“Doesn’t answer my questions.”
“It’s fucking simple – he was a lost kid with shitty parents who didn’t care, that’s it!”
Somehow that seemed infinitely worse, and suddenly, after Michael said it, the whole cabin grew as silent and lifeless as the body of its former owner. They stood face-to-face with each other in a moment of truth they couldn’t comprehend, split between two horrifying possibilities.
The cabin lights began to dim, and they could hear the generator again, sputtering, running low on gas.
“I’ll go take care of it,” Michael said and walked outside to the shed.
“He’ll cool down,” Conner said. “You know how he is.”
Conner sat down beside Jonathan, took the whiskey bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a long pull.
“I hear what you’re saying,” Conner said. “I’ve had similar thoughts. Wondered whether there might be something else going on. It always sounds insane. It has crossed my mind, but there’s another way of looking at all this.”
“And?”
“I know that we all grew apart after your wedding.”
“It wasn’t the wedding.”
“It wasn’t. But I’m sorry that happened. It was just difficult.”
“I know. I was there.”
“I wish we had been there more for Gene.”
“So do I.”
“This incident, this accident, could devastate everyone around us, people we love,” Conner said. “It would ruin Gene’s memory, send us to jail, destroy our reputations. You know all this. It’s not worth it. As much as I feel terrible about this – and I do – it’s a matter of simple calculation. What’s done is done, and no amount of regret, guilt, punishment or embarrassment to our families is going to change that, so we might as well spare them from going through hell.” Conner took a breath from his speech and seemed to collect his thoughts. His eyes changed, no longer the salesman, no longer playing for the crowd, no longer closing a deal. He looked at Jonathan the way he had when they were young.
“It’s our job to go through hell so they don’t have to. That’s what all this is,” Conner said. “Why would it ever be easy? Why would hell make sense? We were damned before the bullet left Gene’s rifle.”
Jonathan took the bottle of whiskey back and tilted it back. He looked at Conner, sitting across from him at the table, Bill’s body floating in the heavy darkness in the background.
“That’s the only honest thing I’ve heard you say in the last ten years,” Jonathan said.
Michael came back inside and sat down, and they passed the bottle back and forth until the ambulance arrived to cart Bill’s body away.
Chapter Thirteen
Dawn, deep and cold. Even in the cabin Jonathan felt the chill. Through the windows he could see the land touched with frost. The air grew light, but the forest of Coombs’ Gulch remained in shadow. He was sore and hurt from last night. A bruise darkened the side of his face. His skin sore from being pummeled in the bar fight. They scrambled a dozen eggs and fried a pound of bacon. The greasy smoke swirled in the morning light. Conner and Michael laid out the gear on the table. Michael would carry the three-man tent. They each carried a sleeping bag. Jonathan would shoulder the inflatable raft, which would carry the boy’s makeshift coffin to the middle of the lake. Each of them took a hunting knife and rifle; the topographic map of Coombs’ Gulch; flashlights, trail mix, jerky and sandwiches stuffed in Ziploc bags; canteens filled with water; lighters and lighter fluid. They dressed in layers beneath their camouflaged coveralls. They would sweat during the day and freeze at night.
The police and paramedics had long since left. They already suspected Bill died of a heart attack. Daryl told the police that Conner had rented the cabin and clearly couldn’t get their deposit back now, and besides, they had no transportation yet. The police agreed Jonathan and the Braddick brothers could remain at the cabin for now, happy to leave and be done with it. Daryl left saying he would deliver Conner’s Suburban in two days. By that time they hoped to be able to pack their things and leave forever.
They dressed in their gloves and hats, and donned their backpacks. All told, they probably carried an extra eighty pounds in gear and clothing. They felt bad already.
Conner opened the rear door of the cabin, and they walked out into a pale light and biting cold. Coombs’ Gulch fell away before them, a vast and dark expanse of black spruce trees born out of acidic soil. The twin ridges of mountain peaks glinted in the sun, catching the first direct rays. Jonathan stood for a moment looking out at the Gulch and felt his fear and history wash away: none of it mattered now. There was only the long walk ahead; there was only the job to be done. Conner was right. This was their hell to walk through. It was mountains and dirt and trees. The weight of the gear sagged his shoulders. He hefted up the rifle and pack, pulled them tight against his body.
The sun was not yet over the eastern ridge. They took shovels and a pickaxe from Bill’s shed. They would dig the site, leave the tools, and retrieve them upon their return. The three of them walked to the edge of the woods where the tree line stood sentry before the Gulch. It was a solid wall of thin, dark conifers pointing to the sky like fingers from the earth. Half of them appeared dead. Spikes of broken limbs jutted from their trunks, flat and sharp. It wasn’t until the very highest reaches that the black spruce would suddenly sprout living branches and dark needles, which sagged like cloaks draped over old women. Dead pine needles covered the ground that was riddled with exposed roots and fallen limbs; blankets of moss covered wet rocks. The trees formed layer after layer upon each other until it resembled a three-dimensional picture on a sheet of paper; there was no depth, merely the illusion of it, a false world.
“I don’t remember it being this thick,” Michael said.
“No wonder everyone says it’s gone dry up here. It’s absolute shit.”
“Wasn’t there a trail before?”
“I can’t see anything.”
They walked the edge of the forest until they reached the corner of the cabin grounds, just past the supply barn and the firepit where Bill’s body had sat upright staring into the trees, and then paced back again. The forest had retaken everything, covered every previous step and trail, twisted and rearranged the landscape like a puzzle put together all wrong.
A slight entrance into the trees appeared to open to them, and they could see fifty feet into the dark woods. They plunged inside like returning to the womb. The sun glimpsed over the mountains and was then hidden from them.
The gear slowed them. Dead branches pulled at their packs, trashy shrubs grasped at their coverall sleeves. They maneuvered the long, wooden handles of the shovels and pickaxe between the trees and branches. The barrel of Jonathan’s rifle caught on brush. The ground was still soft and damp, not yet frozen for the winter. The pine needles made their footsteps nearly silent. The only sounds were their breath and the morning breeze through the Druid-cloaked canopy.
“You hear that?” Michael said.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. Nothing.” There were no birds. It was silent as a grave, and they were the only living creatures walking among the tombstones.
Jonathan followed behind Conner and Michael. He couldn’t say if they were heading in the right direction. They had not traveled very far into the darkness that night ten years ago, just to a hillock overlooking the creek bed. But they had been drunk, intoxicated with bravado, trying to face childhood fears of the forest at night, and they pushed out – boys dressed as men. It had never been a serious attempt at hunting. Looking back, he wondered if they had ever taken anything truly seriously. But that night, beneath the booze, they had been afraid – afraid of what, Jonathan couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was the sense of dread that lingers in the back of everyone’s mind, the thing that drives men and women to engage in all sorts of activities
meant to stave off death or, at the very least, distract them from the coming silence. Everyone rages against it in some way, trying to keep it suppressed so it doesn’t explode. It drives them like an engine. He thought of joggers bouncing up and down the side of his neighborhood road at all hours of morning and night, mere inches from the certain death of passing cars; he thought of writers, composing books so their thoughts and words will somehow live on after they die; of industrious men and women who build companies to outlast their tiny lives; of politicians who craft pointless laws so they can look into the abyss and tell themselves they accomplished something – anything – to make the world and humanity a little better. They all lie to themselves.
And Jonathan thought of himself and Conner, Michael and Gene. What did they do? They confronted death by bringing it to other living creatures, plunging those lives into the abyss and taking their skin and crowns.
Jonathan wanted to leave something behind, something good. He wanted to recover what was lost when they stared into the awful reality of life, a reality in which a random bullet strikes a random child and the world fractures into a million tiny reflections of what could have been.
How far had they truly wandered that night? His memory was flashes of a remembered nightmare. It was only a fiction at this point.
The only truth was a boy buried in a box somewhere in Coombs’ Gulch.
“I don’t remember it being this far,” Michael said. “And I had gone back for the shovels. It wasn’t this far; there’s no way.”
“It’s kind of sloping that way, toward the east,” Conner said. “Everything’s grown over. We had a trail that night.”
Jonathan offered no opinion. They had been hiking for an hour at this point, and he was already growing tired from the overburdened backpack. The brothers’ history of being strangely good at nearly everything they tried seemed to mean little in finding their way through the Gulch.
Conner took out his map. “There’s no way we were this far north. The stream is closer than this. We head due east and we’ll pick it up.”
They walked into the sun as it blared between the peaks of the eastern ridge. The light shone down in rare patches. The sky was a deep, cold blue. The temperature climbed from its nighttime low of twenty. The ground was still soft.
The land sloped imperceptibly toward the lowest point of the Gulch. The forest appeared to open up briefly, the trees spaced apart and the shrubs became larger, taking in sunlight. They passed through dying wild grass; the sun warmed their faces. Suddenly Jonathan felt so far from home and lonely. He thought of Mary and Jacob and was scared. He checked his cell phone, but there was no signal, no way to reach them.
The three of them were silent and Jonathan realized he missed the Braddick brothers and Gene, as well. They had grown up on the same block together during a time when mothers weren’t terrified to let their children disappear for a whole day. A neighborhood riddled with small, ramshackle ranch houses that appeared out of the heavy forested greenery at odd intervals. It was a community pieced together over a century and kept cheap, meant to house tradesmen. Their friendship seemed inevitable, four kids roughly the same age living on the same block. They pressured their tired fathers with calloused hands into buying Daisy BB rifles and ducked into the woods that bordered the neighborhood and descended toward swamplands that puddled in the depressions between rolling New England hills. It smelled of muck and rot. Reeds and willows grew fast and far and crowded the ground. They shot at birds, occasionally knocking a small swallow out of a tree or annoying the crows. A tinge of boyhood guilt came with their first kill – a small chickadee that fell dead to the ground. They poked and prodded it with sticks before finally trudging home and lying awake in their beds, thinking suddenly on life and death with a nausea in their stomachs. On summer evenings they gathered at a cul-de-sac of their neighborhood that was devoid of houses and near an old gravel pit. Surrounded by high trees, they tried shooting the bats as they flapped across darkening skies. It was an impossible task; the bats sensed the BBs coming and in their blindness avoided death.
Michael and Conner were the first to take up hunting. Their uncle took them on a trip for pheasant. They were fifteen and sixteen at the time and returned with two fat, brown birds to eat that night. The uncle took them again and again – for deer, turkey, anything that walked or crawled across the face of the earth that was legal to shoot. The uncle had no children and a lot of money, and he wanted to pass on his love of hunting to his nephews.
Even when they left for college and Gene stayed in town, they returned during weekends and holiday breaks, woke early in the morning, shivering in the cold, and ventured into the old and well-worn hunting grounds together.
It all seemed so far away Jonathan could barely recall it, but he felt he was still that boy, young and afraid. He feared then the life he had now – one of separation and solitude, distance from the camaraderie of youth. He worked at a desk and grew fat and soft. Years slipped by without a true word spoken, with nothing shared. All that existed was work and schedules and a family that he felt incapable of supporting. At some point there had been a trade, one made without his knowledge that left him trapped, painted into a corner by expectations and desperation. Like a creature whose base instinct lures it into a cage baited with food, their lives would have progressed quietly and quickly into adulthood – but for the boy buried in the woods.
His childhood fears had been replaced with something different, and now he fought for the trap; he struggled into the woods to keep the only life he knew. It was all he had, and for that reason he loved it. It was a strange dichotomy, which tore at him.
Michael and Conner were ahead in the distance now, dressed in their camouflaged hunting gear. He strained to see them. The black, gray and white of their jumpsuits blended with the trees. They seemed to melt into the forest, revealed only by their motion. They slipped in and out of their surroundings like ghosts.
He heard the fast-moving water of the brook that bifurcated the Gulch up ahead. The sun reached down through a break in the trees and touched them all. The brothers stopped and turned to stare at him.
Chapter Fourteen
The brook waters ran cold from the northernmost edge of Coombs’ Gulch through the center of the valley, growing in size and force as it flowed south into Pasternak. It was the same flow of water they had seen twisting around the dead town, the same snakelike stream beside which they had buried the boy with the star-shaped hole for an eye.
They had traveled too far north and backtracked along the brook where the dense undergrowth gave way to grassy tuffets and the rocky riverbed. The trees retreated far back in this section of the stream, leaving a long, low flatland of scrub brush and tall grasses turned gold in their autumn dying. The lowland area stretched a quarter mile before disappearing into the spruce forest again. It was quiet and brown and seemingly untouched by life in the bright sun. It was a place where the wildlife would gather to drink from the stream and nip at the fruit-bearing shrubs. It was here Jonathan had bagged his first buck of their trip ten years ago. The brook seemed to talk. It drowned out their silence.
They followed the stream now, unsure of their location, unsure of where they had been that night they buried the boy. They wandered, frustrated, feeling lost, their packs heavy, shovels and pickaxe awkward, their energy draining before they even began the most arduous part of the journey.
Toward the southern edge of the lowlands, turning a bend in the stream, they saw a small rise at the edge of the trees – the hillock from which they saw those yellow eyes glowing bright and alien in the darkness at the very edge of the spotlight’s range. They all remembered the giant northern raisin bush where they found the boy and buried his body. Michael eyed the hillock and traced an imaginary trajectory with his finger to a dense patch of shrubs. They saw it there – the raisin bush, grown large as an explosion, heavy with leaves, the ground before it overgrown with
grass and weeds. They walked to it and stood momentarily in silence before putting their gear to the side. Michael took the pickaxe, swung it high over his head and buried the blade into the rocky soil. A wild scream went up from somewhere in the distance, high-pitched and awful, like a woman dying. It seemed neither animal nor human.
They stopped and waited. Sweat brushed their brows.
“Fisher-cat?” Conner said. “Didn’t sound right. Too long and drawn out.”
“Vixens,” Michael said. “Bobcats. They make that kind of sound.”
Jonathan raised his Remington to his shoulder and sighted in the edge of the trees one hundred yards away with his scope. He ran it along the tree line. The forest was dark with shade. A slight breeze came from the north.
“It sounded far away,” Conner said.
Jonathan watched for a time, letting his breath out slowly, finger resting on the trigger guard. He glassed the lowlands to the north of them. The scream went up again, the unworldly sound an animal can make in the throes of death or sex. He lowered the rifle to take in the whole area.
“Anything?”
Jonathan shook his head.
“With the damn echo of this place, it could be a mile off or right next to us,” Conner said.
“We wouldn’t see it anyway,” Jonathan said.
“Fire a shot. Scare it off,” Michael said. “Last thing we need is some big cat following us.”
Jonathan hadn’t fired a shot in ten years. He pointed the barrel in the air, turned his head down and to the side and squeezed the heavy trigger until a blast roared over the valley and the gun bucked in his hand. They waited a moment while the high-pitched ringing in their ears died down and the echo rolled off the mirror image mountains to the east and west.
Jonathan brought the scope to his eye once again and scanned the limits of the lowland grasses. The reeds shifted in the morning breeze; amber waves of grain ran through his mind. He saw nothing, but he felt something, a presence in the lonely solitude of that place.
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