by Brian Hodge
The horse’s hooves reached a crescendo, and its rider bellowed in triumph as they eclipsed the sky. The axe was raised high for its final descent.
And I screamed.
I awoke on the ground, and of all the idiot things to do, I reached up to feel my head. Still attached. I should expect otherwise?
I didn’t yet sit up. Instead, I gazed up toward a warm, blue sky, nearly cloudless. A single-engine plane buzzed in the distance, my first sign of twentieth-century reality.
I decided to chance it, and sat up. Looked around. My car was back, exactly where I’d parked it. The pond rippled under an easy, warm breeze. Woodland stretched off all around, but now it was flat again.
Idyllic. How many times had I thought that of Tri-Lakes? But surface appearances can be so deceiving, like the man who has quietly maintained a constant life of routine for years and years, who keeps to himself, whom everyone respects, who bothers no one … and who goes home one afternoon to efficiently and cold-bloodedly dispatch his entire family.
I picked myself up, took a few shaky steps toward my car. My earlier anger had faltered, and Tri-Lakes couldn’t help but know it.
I couldn’t beat it, this much I knew. I’d probably be doing good just to survive. Any way I could. Even if that meant running.
I fired up the car. Lifted my head just before driving away.
“You want me,” I said, “you’ll have to chase me.”
Because I was out of my league. I’d recognized its face. Or at least the face it had chosen to show me. A face no one had seen for nearly a millennium. I’d seen enough woodcuts, drawings, movies.
I had just seen the face of a Viking.
Chapter 18
Another couple of weeks passed, and Rick didn’t show up. Not that I expected him to.
I’d slowly gotten used to the idea of never seeing him again. It hurt as deeply as pain can be felt, but I could at least accept it. So could his parents, apparently. They wanted a memorial service for him. Lots of people told them to be patient, Rick would turn up, just wait and see. But they went ahead with it anyway. Maybe they wanted to have it before most everyone forgot there ever had been a Rick Woodward. Or at least pretended so.
The service was held the afternoon of the final Saturday in July, at the Methodist church where the Woodwards belonged. Quite a number of people turned out, a lot of them kids from school. Rick was an only child, but the Woodwards sat in the front row with other family members, a few of whom I’d met over the years. His mom and dad seemed to be bearing up well, but I guess the intervening weeks had given them a lot of practice. I sat in the third row, Phil and Connie to my left, Aaron to my right. Our parents had come too, but were somewhere back among the rest of the crowd.
Dirgelike music droned from the organ while everyone was still seating themselves. Slow music, somber, thoroughly depressing.
“Rick wouldn’t like this at all,” Phil whispered in my ear.
“I know.” I tugged at my collar; ties always strangled me. And despite the church’s central air, beneath my jacket I was sweating.
Phil smiled sadly. “I bet Rick would rather have had a cookout in his honor.”
“I bet you’re right.”
To some, that may have sounded like a crass idea, but to me it made a lot more sense than packing everyone in for a downbeat afternoon and sending them home miserable.
After the organ stopped, the service began. A young woman from the church sang a bittersweet ballad, accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar, which seemed appropriate. Rick would have approved. You could hear isolated weepers scattered throughout the church, and I tried my best to tune them out. But it was contagious, and I found my own eyes misting up a time or two.
The minister came next. He tried, that’s the best I can say. But then, I bet he’d never spoken at a service under quite the same circumstances as these. So he tried.
And after it was over, we filed out in subdued rows, and I couldn’t say it had helped me in the least. That damned organ started up again, and the murmur of conversation picked up, most of it adult. I’ve noticed that adults are considerably more vocal at the funeral of a kid than the kid’s friends. His peers, I think, are shocked into silence, caught in a surreal situation that brings their own mortality a little closer than it was the day before. Ah, but the adults … they know just what to say:
“—such a fine tribute—”
“—knew him since he was three or four—”
“—bet this is such a comfort to his family—”
“—always needed a haircut, though—”
“—still fairly young, maybe they can have another child—”
“—know just how they feel, my daughter hasn’t called home in two months—”
Ad nauseam.
I found my fists clenching. Shut the fuck up! I wanted to scream. You didn’t know the first thing about him! You didn’t share one single dream of his, you didn’t cry with him whenever it almost got to be too much. You just. Didn’t. Know.
After the service, we hung around for a while in front of the church, and I spoke to several friends I hadn’t seen much since school let out. That’s another thing: A dead kid’s friends never want to leave the funeral home, or the church. They clump together in subdued little groups, hands in pockets or arms crossed over chests, looking to the sky and the ground for answers that never come. They cling to one another. Not physically, but emotionally. Because they know there are no guarantees someone else won’t buy it on the way home.
I gazed up at the church, gray masonry with English-looking trim, walls crawling with ivy. Beyond, the sky was cloudless and bright blue. Far too lovely a day for feeling as dismal inside as I did. I loosened my tie and collar, took off my jacket. After all, Rick would’ve wanted it that way.
“I didn’t get much out of that,” Phil said quietly.
Connie and Aaron and I nodded agreement.
“I still can’t accept it that we may never see him again,” Aaron said, hanging close to my side. “It hasn’t sunk in.”
“I know this sounds terrible,” Connie whispered, “but I can never get that idea through my head unless … there’s a body up there.”
We mulled this over, and nobody jumped on her for sounding too morbid or wishing the worst for Rick. In some ways, his body lying in state would’ve been better than the hopeless uncertainty of it all.
“Should’ve had something up there,” Phil said.
Aaron lifted his head up. “How about his guitar? Would that’ve been too tacky?”
We gave it some thought and agreed that we, at least, didn’t think so.
Someone else joined our little clique then. Valerie. I’d seen her earlier in the church, though at a distance. She looked especially pretty in a violet sundress. I wondered if she’d even speak to me.
She did, but it was cursory, and she spent just as much time greeting Aaron and Phil and Connie. None of them knew the real reason behind our split. Valerie didn’t stand next to me, I noticed with a twinge. Safety in numbers, I guess.
We talked about Rick a bit longer, trading memories of what we liked most about him. And I felt sorry for Connie. She’d known Rick the shortest time of any of us, and had the least to contribute. But I didn’t pity her because I thought she might feel out of place. I did so because we were talking about someone she would never have the opportunity to get to know.
Eventually our little group began to disintegrate. First Aaron wandered off to visit with some other friends. Then Phil and Connie, looking more and more like a couple every time I saw them, decided to leave. Hand in hand. This left Val and me standing alone with one another.
And right then I thought it was probably the most awkward moment of my life. I doubted she was much better. Eye contact seemed next to impossible for her.
“So…” The master of the opening line, that’s me. “How have you been?”
“Getting by.” She looked at me straight on, finally. “You?”
Clearly she hadn’t expected this, though it didn’t seem to particularly pain her. “Where?”
“Up at Andrews, with Phil. I applied a couple weeks ago, right after that weekend we … well, you know. Andrews has some ridiculously late closing date for legacy applications. Guess I barely squeaked in under the wire.”
“Then everything’s all set for you?”
“No, not yet. I’m just in, that’s all. I still have to get my schedule figured out, find someplace to live.”
“Nothing like waiting until the last minute,” she said, but there was no spite in it.
I stared down at my shoetips, endlessly fascinating all of a sudden. “Look, I was wondering if you might want to swing by for a little while tonight.”
She didn’t answer one way or another, but you didn’t have to be a genius to see she wasn’t jumping at the idea.
“I just want to say goodbye, try to wrap things up. I hate leaving them like this.” I looked around at the thinning crowd before the church. “And this hardly seems like the best place for it.”
She twisted uncomfortably, and I ached at the way her body moved under that sundress. “I don’t know, Chris.”
“I’ll give you a cattle prod to hold on me,” I said, and tried out my most disarming smile.
And I guess it worked.
I managed to snare the house for my very own that evening. Aaron was no problem — he had to work. I talked Mom and Dad into going out to a movie. They understood the situation, or at least the altered version I’d told them, and it wasn’t too difficult a task. They trusted me, more or less, to behave myself at home with a girl. That’s not to say the trust was always earned, but when fortune smiled, I didn’t argue.
I don’t know what I thought I’d accomplish with the evening. I suppose part of me wanted to win her back, although the rational side of me knew that that ship had sailed. So I guess that my secondary motivation was to simply pave the way for some future reconciliation.
Still, I hadn’t lied that afternoon. I really did want to part more amicably than we had a couple weeks before. I hated leaving with bad blood between us.
And so I guess on that level, and that level alone, the evening was a success.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell you how sorry I am for that night,” I told her. We were sitting on my bedroom floor.
Valerie nodded. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that it doesn’t matter.”
Stalemate.
I leaned back against my bed, head thrown back as I stared up at the ceiling. “It just turned into a rotten summer. The worst ever.” I felt that I knew where to lay the blame, but I couldn’t tell her.
She grabbed a throw pillow lying against the wall, hugged it to her chest, then doubled up her knees and propped her chin on them. Our body language was so defensive that night, so guarded.
“Maybe it is best that you get away from this town for a while.”
“Maybe.” Under normal circumstances, it probably would’ve been the best thing in the world for me.
But then, normal circumstances hadn’t gotten me into this mess to begin with. And now that I was in, it sometimes seemed that all I was doing was running away from a lot of unresolved problems, a lot of responsibilities.
Shit. Why me?
Valerie stayed another twenty minutes, and neither of us said much more of any consequence. And when she decided it was time to leave, she put my pillow back into place, smoothed her blouse, let me walk her to the front door. I offered to shake hands. She kissed me, but it was a kiss devoid of passion, and on the cheek, as well. The kind of kiss reserved for relatives, or childhood friends, or the nice nerdy guy a girl can trust and talk to because he’s no threat to her. I would’ve preferred the handshake.
I watched as she walked straight and steady out to her canary-yellow Bobcat and drove out of my life, taillights shooting down the street until they vanished and her engine faded away to nothing.
No pain, curiously enough. Just a hollow numbness.
I returned to my room, alone and at the mercy of the lingering traces of her perfume. I put on a Doors album and lay atop my bed in the dark to listen, floating away on turbulent clouds of music and welcoming the release. The farther away I could go, the better.
Until the doorbell rang.
Up immediately, on my feet and grinning. She’d changed her mind, and hot damn, making up is fun to do. I bounced into the hallway, tucking in my shirt. Then I pulled it back out. No sense in having her think I was trying to look my best when opening the door. Then I tucked it in again. No sense in letting her think I was starting to let myself go.
The last person I expected to see when I opened the door was Rick’s mother. She wore the same navy blue dress she’d worn earlier to the memorial service. Her eyes were red and puffy, and her face was pale, further setting off her eyes. Those thin, mousy features looked fragile enough to shatter into a thousand fragments.
“Mrs. Woodward,” I said, stepping aside in the doorway. “Here, why don’t you come in?”
She tried to smile but couldn’t bring it off. “No. Thank you. I just came by for a moment.”
Only then did I notice the car idling in our driveway.
“Uh … I always meant to come back over again,” I said. “You know, after that first time.”
She grabbed one of my hands with her own small cold one. “I know. I know.” A shudder rippled through her shoulders. “I didn’t have an opportunity to talk to you at the service today. I just wanted to thank you. For being Rick’s friend. Rick didn’t have many friends, really.”
“Oh sure, Mrs. Woodward. Rick had a million friends.” Surely she had to see that, especially after the turnout earlier.
She shook her head, pushed her hair back. “No. Rick had a lot of admirers, that’s true. But so few he felt he could count on as friends, and trust them to really be there for him. He told me so. And he told me that he felt closest of all to you.”
I could do little more than stand in the doorway. And I would surely have traded everything I owned to have Rick back again for five minutes. To hug him. To thank him. To tell him I loved him for who he was inside, not what his fingers could do to a guitar.
“Rick was always a little different,” she said. “We always knew that. And it seems to me that people like that need good friends even more than the rest of us. You were always there during his rough times, Chris. So thank you.”
My voice barely came out, and sounded hoarse and soft. “I don’t know what to say.”
She stepped forward and hugged me briefly, then moved back. “There’s something I want you to have.” She pulled something bulky from the shadows to her left, something she’d leaned against the house. And she offered it to me. For a moment I could only stare. Rick’s Martin twelve-string.
Slowly, carefully, I took the guitar and case from her hands. Held it. Almost caressed it.
Mrs. Woodward managed a smile. “Rick thought you might have a little talent hidden away inside. So I knew he’d want you to have this. And … and if he should … come back … and wonder where it is, I’ll tell him I gave it to you for safekeeping.”
Words still eluded me. I could only hope she would know how I felt from the expression on my face.
“Good night, Chris. Please know that you’re always welcome in our home.” She turned and walked back to the waiting car, and I stood framed in the doorway until they’d backed onto the street.
Valerie had left me numb, but this cored me out completely. Hugging the guitar case close, I carried it back to my room, laid it on the bed as gently as a newborn fresh from the hospital. I opened the snaps, then the lid. The polished wood gave a mellow gleam, six pairs of strings bisecting the guitar up the middle. I touched them, and they gave off a soft c
hord that rang forever.
Very carefully, I lifted the guitar out and rested its curved edge on my thigh as I sat on the bed. I fingered a few open chords that Rick had taught me over the years. The strings bit into my fingertips like tiny teeth, and the feeling brought back memories of junior high, of Rick and his perpetually sore fingers.
I found a pick inside the case and began to strum the guitar, fingers stumbling through a few chord changes and somehow coming up with sounds that weren’t half bad.
I felt a strange sort of peace inside, a bittersweet happiness, a feeling I’d been craving for a long while. I now had a little bit of Rick for my very own. Maybe he was gone, but part of his spirit was mine. A part that would never age, never die.
Chapter 19
Plans for college fell into place, a minor miracle in itself. The first of August, a Friday, I knocked off a day of work and Mom and Dad and I drove up to Bloomington to get me squared away, finalizing my class schedule and housing. Since I had little to no idea of what I wanted to do in the world, I joined the other lemmings like myself and enrolled in a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. That’s where they shovel a liberal amount of everything at you so they can later tell you what you like.
For housing, I took a dorm room in a place called Scott Hall. If memory served correctly, this was the same hall as Phil’s. I didn’t know what my roommate’s name was, which was just as well. I had no desire to sweat it out like Phil in anticipation of what kind of guy would be named Ashley Hopkins.
It didn’t take long to get to feeling at ease with the campus atmosphere. Serving a population of about six thousand students, the buildings were a blend of old and new. Some had been standing since the early 1900s, while others had been built within the past ten years. And Andrews was shady — trees were everywhere you looked, ringing the buildings, lining the winding sidewalks, growing in regimented rows along the streets. The place was almost too quaint.
Sanctuary, I thought while standing on the quad. It’ll be safe here. Then, as an afterthought, No Vikings allowed, ha ha. Right.
