“What makes you think we can even find it once we’re up there?” Jonathan said.
“Have you forgotten where it is?” Michael said.
Jonathan looked down at his drink. “No, no, I haven’t.” Then, “Where do we move it?”
“There’s a lake on the other side of the western ridge,” Conner said. “Part of the deal for the roadway and the developers was that section of forest would be preserved indefinitely. The lake there is deep, two hundred feet, easy. Made from an old glacier back in the ice age. It’s even more remote than Coombs’ Gulch.”
“How far?”
“Seven miles.”
“Seven miles? Are you kidding me? Hauling that thing through that terrain?”
“We put some holes in the trunk, load it with rocks, take it out to the center of the lake and sink it. It’ll never be found.”
“It,” Jonathan said.
“That’s the best I can do. I don’t know what to call…whatever. That’s the plan. It would probably be a two-day hike, considering the gear. We’ll need a raft to get the trunk to the deepest part of the lake. After that we haul ass back to the cabin and just…just forget about it.”
“This is so wrong,” Jonathan said.
“It’s been wrong since the beginning,” Michael said. “Wrong would be letting it ruin everyone else’s life besides our own. This is the best we’ve got.”
There it was, Jonathan thought, the same excuse used around the world for centuries to justify every lying, cheating and murderous man of means or politician to cover up his crime after the fact. But they weren’t even men of means; they were just three losers sitting in a bar, trying to eke out a middle-class existence. Their downfall would ruin the lives of the people they loved. For everyone else it would be a quick headline in the newspaper.
But still, the thought of Mary or Jacob knowing what he did – and subsequently who he truly was – meant he had to do it. Exposing his soul terrified him more than any prison sentence and more than any seven-mile hike, hauling the remains of his life over a mountain so it could sink to the bottom of a lake. Jonathan realized just then that he was the most frightening thing he’d ever encountered. He thought suddenly of that night in the strip club, of stumbling hand in hand with a dancer and catching a glimpse of a pathetic and evil creature in the mirror. Since that night in Coombs’ Gulch, he had lived with that mirror image; it was horrible and twisted and inescapable. He was no longer sure which version of himself was true, but he didn’t want to gaze upon it anymore and never wanted his wife and child to see it – ever.
“No one else will be up there?” he asked.
“According to Bill, no one has been up there for years. Hunting went to shit. Place is all dried up. He even tried to convince me not to waste the money because the animals had all cleared out. I told him we just wanted to get away, old times’ sake.”
Jonathan looked at the Braddick brothers across the table, both of them staring back in unison like a pair of snakes, entrancing him with their eyes.
“How long have you been planning this?”
“I found out six months ago,” Conner said.
“And you’re just telling me now?”
“We didn’t think you’d say yes until now.”
Jonathan slowly moved his finger around the rim of his beer. “Did Gene know?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear them say it. He looked back and forth between the two brothers.
Conner sighed. “We told him last week. We thought he could help convince you.”
Jonathan stared at them. “You’re the reason he’s dead. The two of you. You fucking killed him.”
“No,” Conner said. “Gene killed himself when he pulled the trigger and if we don’t fix this it will kill the rest of us, too.”
Jonathan drove the short distance home that night drunk, the heavy, impenetrable darkness of a moonless night surrounding his car – the lone beacon of light on the roads. There were no streetlights in their small town; the setting sun plunged the area into darkness. He turned into his wooded neighborhood and it seemed abandoned, every house light off, everyone unconscious in their sleep, a whole world slumbering away, blinked out of existence. Up ahead – just beyond the cone of his headlights – some animal trundled across the street and looked up at his encroaching vehicle. Its eyes shone two spectral, glowing circles in the night before it scurried into the underbrush. The truncated lope told him it was a large raccoon, but in his dreamlike state of fear and drunkenness, he pictured it as a skinny, naked child demonically galloping across the roadway in a horrifying animal pantomime. Jonathan wondered, deep in the reaches of his most delusional suspicions, what had truly happened that night in Coombs’ Gulch. All of it – the terror, the fear, the shame, the years of searching – made him question the very facts of the night that ruined his life.
Jonathan unlocked the door and walked into a silent house, both Mary and Jacob asleep. He walked upstairs to change and pass out in bed. He saw Mary breathing lightly beneath the sheets. Beside her a smaller figure, curled into a ball and tucked back into her belly. Seeing them there together in a symbiotic-like unity made him feel achingly alone, as if he had no part in Jacob’s creation. No. He was meant only for destruction. Perhaps that is all men are good for, he thought, tearing down, blood, death. Perhaps that served a purpose, but it was not the purpose he glimpsed while watching Mary and Jacob curled together, breathing in unison.
He took some blankets from a wicker bin in the living room and fell asleep on the couch.
Chapter Five
He told Mary they were all taking a trip – a final send-off for Gene and a chance to rebuild their friendship. It was a lie, but it seemed to give her hope and relief, as if she might finally be unburdened of the tension that radiated within her husband and darkened the nice home she was struggling to build. Mary was, of course, supportive. She always said the right things to him, but that was all she said, and the words rang empty. For the past several years she spoke to him the way a stranger with a modicum of social awareness would converse with a new acquaintance. But he could see the relief in her eyes, the way her body somehow relaxed upon hearing the news that he would be gone for a few days, that he would be gathering with his old friends. He saw her hope that maybe a piece of the man she fell in love with would be revitalized. More than once, Jonathan had thought of divorcing Mary so she would no longer be infected by the sins of his past, and he was sure the thought had crossed her mind at some point, that she had wondered how her life had gone from such hope and joy to a morass of quiet desperation. But then he would look at Jacob and know he couldn’t actually do it. He was responsible for Jacob. His boy was the only chance he had at redemption. He may have buried one boy in the mountains, but he could endure anything to be sure Jacob survived, was loved and cared for.
Jacob’s birth was not an easy one. He became stuck in the birth canal, sending the doctor and the nurses scrambling to be sure he didn’t suffocate. They tried forceps at first, plunging this crude metal device into Mary’s soft, fleshy body in an attempt to pull the boy by his face into the world. It all seemed very medieval at the time, the wonders of medicine given way to harsh instruments. Then they attempted a suction tube. As there was only one doctor and two nurses, Jonathan was co-opted to hold one of Mary’s heavy, swollen legs on his shoulder while they attempted to extract Jacob from his mother. The vacuum inserted inside his wife could not keep hold of Jacob’s head. It pulled loose and sprayed them all with blood and afterbirth. It spotted his shirt and face. It was a messy affair, filled with images and smells he associated more with hunting and gutting a deer than with the miraculous beauty of birth. But even hunting was cleaner than the day his son was born. Cleaning a kill was not rushed. There was no scramble to save the animal. It all went smooth as clockwork. Jacob’s birth was entirely different. Life was messier and more traumatic than death.
Since Jacob’s birth, Jonathan worried over him like an old grandmother. Mary would tell him to let the boy be, let him grow up and learn the hard way on occasion. “You have to let him explore and get hurt,” she said. “You have to let him be a boy on his own.” Part of him wondered whether it was that exact line of reasoning that allowed a ten-year-old boy to end up in Coombs’ Gulch in the middle of the night. The thought of any tragedy befalling Jacob was enough to send Jonathan’s mind spiraling back to that moment of birth, that massive, overwhelming power he’d felt that day. He did his best to suppress it, but it stayed with him all the same. Mary, on the other hand, seemed to accept that tragedy was a part of life, at peace with the prospect of cancer and car crashes, kidnappers and boys accidentally shot by hunters in the dead of night. But, of course, it was easy to be at peace with the prospect when you had never experienced the reality. Her peace was built on innocence and, for that, he resented her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem so distant and…” She paused for a moment, like she was considering her words. “Angry.”
“I’m not angry,” Jonathan said. “I just have a lot on my mind.” He anticipated her follow-up question and answered it before she could ask. “You know, just with Gene and everything.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” she said.
“Well, then I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.
“You’re using Gene to hide something else. It’s like a ghost haunting this place. Or maybe it’s just haunting you. There are only three people in this family, Jonathan, but I swear the house feels crowded.”
She was right. The house was crowded and they were haunted. It was suffocating. Mary could take Jacob and leave, but he had to live with it. He hoped that if they could all just tough it out for a few more weeks, it could finally be over. That somehow returning to Coombs’ Gulch and confronting the past, burying it forever, would stop the decay because it was seeping poison into the rest of them. It was infecting Jacob.
It began with the night terrors. The doctors said it was normal for children, but there was nothing that could convince Jonathan that what he saw and heard when his son was in the throes of this nightmare was normal. He and Mary would be seated on the couch, watching a television program, and suddenly a scream would burst forth from his son’s bedroom. A scream in the dark and then more screaming and crying, and by the time they reached his room he was up wandering around his room, completely unconscious, but his eyes looking everywhere as if he were lost. Jacob never actually saw his parents standing in front of him. Instead, he looked through them, seeing whatever terrors existed in his mind. No amount of consoling and hugging and petting made the crying and trembling stop. Nothing about that seemed normal to Jonathan. What could a child possibly dream that would cause such terror? Jacob’s life was devoid of anything frightening. He knew only his small, sheltered life, his parents and his school.
Perhaps some vestigial memories from his time in the womb, Jonathan thought. Or maybe his memories were even older.
One night Jonathan yelled at the boy more than he should have, more than would otherwise be acceptable. Mary wasn’t home. She was out with one of her girlfriends. They went to a gym together at night sometimes, after the friend’s children had gone to bed, though he believed she was just trying to escape him for a time, to limit the one-on-one time they spent together between Jacob falling asleep and him retiring to bed after a couple of tumblers of scotch. Mary had always been in fair shape, although she never exercised much. But she found solace in this new friend and Jonathan pretended he was unaware of her true motives.
Jacob woke screaming and crying earlier than usual, but Jonathan was exhausted after the day and just wanted some quiet time to himself. Jonathan dragged himself up the stairs toward Jacob’s room, cursing that he couldn’t have a single moment of peace.
By the time he reached Jacob’s room, the boy had already sleepwalked into his closet and peed all over his clothes and shoes.
Jonathan snapped. He screamed and cursed at the small, terrified boy and threw the wet clothes out of his closet into the center of the room. Jonathan’s initial roar shocked Jacob from his sleep, and suddenly he was looking at his father – truly looking at him – his eyes wet in sheer terror, his small body trembling, newly awoken to a raging, giant figure in his room.
Jonathan saw it all happening. Somewhere in his mind, in another part of his consciousness that makes calm, compassionate decisions, he saw Jacob’s fear and terror and knew it was an accident, that it wasn’t the boy’s fault, that he had been sleepwalking, and Jonathan felt so desperately sorry for his son, that this awful moment should become one of those earliest memories of his father, never forgotten.
Jonathan knew all this. But still some other part of himself – a more violent and frightening part – moved forward with his verbal abuse until he had run himself hoarse and breathless. Jonathan turned around in the room, now strewn with urine-soaked clothes, and looked down at Jacob, who was still trembling in shock. He took Jacob, put him back to bed and shut off the light. Jonathan went downstairs and took a long, long pull from a bottle of scotch. He hoped with all his heart that his son would not remember any of it in the morning. He took another drink, hoping it would erase the memory from his own mind. It was another terrible moment of his life, the number of which kept racking up, but he felt it inextricably tied to the other mortal guilt on his soul.
It was all a darkness, raging, reaching fingers out to affect his boy, his wife, everything he saw or felt or touched or thought. He would do anything and everything to end it. Somewhere in his mind he suspected that returning to Coombs’ Gulch and sending the boy’s body to the bottom of a lost lake would not ease his soul. But any chance, no matter how slim, was worth it to avoid this blooming disaster in his small family. He would move forward, just like Conner and Michael. It was worth the risk.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Mary, but he was fresh out of ideas and there was a wall that would never let the truth out. “I’ll work on it. I’m trying to be a good person, I really am.”
She touched the side of his face. “You are a good person, Jonathan. I don’t know why you would ever think otherwise.”
“Yeah,” he said and buried his face into her hand, “we’re all good people.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for up there,” she said.
Late that night, under the guise of preparing for his trip, Jonathan went to the basement, moved aside an old, cheap room divider and unlocked a dull green metal safe with a key. His rifles and a shotgun stood upright and dusty in the dark of that thin locker; the top shelf held two handguns. He hadn’t opened the safe in more than a year, and the smell of old oil and steel touched his nostrils. Staring at them after so long a time, Jonathan thought the firearms looked dull, inert, like a hammer forgotten at the bottom of a toolbox. For all the political mileage guns made for politicians, for all the anger and sorrow that surrounded them, they were underwhelming – pieces of metal and wood, narrow and devoid of the life given them. They leaned dumbly against the side of the safe and looked like toys. He took out his Remington .30-06 and felt its quiet heft. He slid open the bolt and checked the breach. Dust clung to oily remnants. The last time he’d held this rifle they’d buried a boy in the woods.
Jonathan took a long drink from a glass of whiskey and waited until the liquor dulled his brain. In the dim light of his concrete basement, he wiped down the barrel with an oil
cloth. He shined the wood stock, wiped out the interior of the breech and ran a long, snakelike brush through the spiraled rifling of the bore. He sprayed new oil onto the bolt and action. He ran a couple of dry fires, the firing pin clicking home with each cycle. He took another drink and thought about Gene.
He took down the nine-millimeter handgun he carried for finishing off deer who were not yet dead but unable to run any farther. It happened more often than not. Even with a solidly placed kill shot, the deer still takes off running. They’re dead but still going, running deeper and deeper into the woods. Then you find it still hanging on, curled up in a bed of leaves, blood pumping from a hole in its side, tongue peeking from its black snout as the breath comes shorter and shallower. The nine millimeter puts them out of their misery.
Unlike humans – unlike Gene – an animal never admits death; they never quit. A deer could have its organs blown to bits and a hole the size of a human head in its side, excruciating pain strangling every breath, and still it would never conceive of ending its own existence. It was up to the hunter to ensure the animal ceased to live. It was the hunter who set it all in motion and who had to see it through to the end. Once the shot was fired the hunter and deer were wed, bound to each other until the end. Sometimes that marriage between hunter and hunted resembled a child’s game of hide-and-seek after the deer bounded into the forest; other times it was a quick, silent process. Once the shot is fired the game is set. You see yourself in their dark eyes and die just a little with the final shot.
It was a strange facet of human existence, he thought. Human consciousness is like a curse – a dull, never-ending pain that finally kills its host. An animal can endure any amount of physical pain and never conceive of death as the answer. People, on the other hand, look to it, seek it out. What physical pain cannot do – namely, drive a creature to desire its own death – human rationale can do over mere feelings spurred by memory, morality and society. It was not pain that pushed Gene toward death but anguish coupled with pure rationality. He just did an easy equation: history plus growing day-to-day misery with no chance of change equals death as the best option.
Boy in the Box Page 5
