Oasis

by Brian Hodge

  “I waited for him out in the parking lot.” Hurdles fished a bake sale cupcake from the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. “His mom must be making him try on every suit in the store.” He laughed loudly until he plugged up his maw with the cupcake.

  The Rams completed a pass for a touchdown. Twenty-thirteen. The crowd roared and there came a fanfare of music from the band.

  “You going to the dance tomorrow night?” I asked Mitch.

  He shook his head with a scornful smile. “Nah. I never got into that scene. Got a normal date. Tons cheaper.”

  “Wouldn’t catch me at that dance,” Hurdles said as he licked his fingers clean. “All those assholes in suits and ties, buying flowers and driving Daddy’s car to impress some little cunt.”

  Aaron began talking to Mitch, pretending not to have heard. But Phil stepped up to Hurdles, a hair’s breadth from knocking him chest to chest, and laid a rigid finger on the top of his breastbone. “I’m gonna be there tomorrow night.”

  The course of Hurdles’s entire history did an abrupt about-face in that moment. The Hurdles we once knew would have reacted by shrinking back and apologizing all over himself. Hey, you know I was just fooling around, I didn’t mean you, Phil, hell no, I was just kidding, what’s a little kidding among friends, right, hah hah hah.

  But Hurdles stood his ground. He tilted his chin up arrogantly and very deliberately batted Phil’s hand away. And stood there tense, electric, his jaw clenched hard enough to bite through an iron bar.

  I know it took Phil by surprise. He backed away, standing by me with a frown creasing his forehead. He looked disgusted with Hurdles, but even more so with himself.

  The game’s lead bounced back and forth like a ping-pong ball and the crowd was approaching to a frenzy. Then, when the Rams followed one touchdown with an interception and another TD, everyone melted into a giddy sort of relaxation. Less than two minutes of play left, and it didn’t look like the Rangers had any tricks up their sleeves.

  A tug at my elbow then. “Chris?” The voice was familiar.

  I turned. It was Shelly Potter, wearing jeans and boots and a puffy down vest … considerably more than when I’d last seen her over Labor Day weekend. Beneath her glasses, her cheeks were flushed with the evening chill.

  “Hey, how are you doing?” I said, wondering if the grief process had trudged a little further for her. “Do you cover sports, too?”

  She laughed. “No way. I just like coming to these games.”

  “And you’re not even a native. What’s the matter? Didn’t they have high school football in Kansas City?”

  “Not like this,” she said. “Back home it felt more laid back, win, lose, or draw. But here…” She shook her head. “Here people get absolutely rabid.” She pointed downfield toward the Rams’ benches and the cheerleaders. “I was down that way a little while ago, and the cheerleaders were shredding the effigy of a Ranger.”

  “Somebody must’ve cut him down,” I said.

  She cocked an inquisitive eyebrow, an appealing expression on her. “You lost me there.”

  “Local tradition. Every year someone climbs the water tower the night before and hangs a dummy from one of the cross struts. Last year, I somehow got credit for doing it.”

  “Living dangerously even then, I see.” She pointed at my head. “You’ve shagged out some.”

  “Do you disapprove?” And why did I care, all of a sudden?

  She shook her head. “Not at all. It becomes you. It makes you look more…” She cocked her head, as if searching for the proper word. “More timeless, or something.”

  By now, Phil and my brother and his friends were obviously wondering who I was talking with, so I introduced her around. With Phil and Aaron there were no problems. Mitch regarded her with a juvenile/macho sort of longing and I think she had enough of a sense of humor to take it in stride. But Hurdles looked at her with his greedy pig-eyes, a filthy, lip-licking stare that even I felt uncomfortable around. Shelly shrank from it. And took a step closer to me, I noticed.

  A whistle shrilled from the field and a penalty flag was thrown. All of us turned to watch and the moment was broken. Thankfully.

  “Listen, I feel weird about this,” she said a moment later, “but I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you.”

  “Name it.”

  “Could I have a lift home? I came here with a friend, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she sleazed off with somebody else. Forty-five minutes and not a sign of her.”

  “Sure, not a problem.” I blew into my fist to warm it. “I rode with Phil, but he won’t mind. He’s a born chauffeur.”

  We watched the game another minute or so, until fifty-five seconds were left and the Rangers called a futile time-out. We decided to take off and beat the rush; our guys had this one sewn up. After saying goodbye to Aaron and the rest, the three of us headed out the gate. A handful of others were doing the same thing.

  “I want to apologize for the leer you got back there from Chuck Horton,” I said.

  “He was creepy, wasn’t he? Friend of yours?”

  “No. He’s just a ship that’s crossed our path.”

  “An aircraft carrier, more like,” Phil said.

  “He’s kind of pathetic, really,” I said. “The only reason my brother and that other guy put up with him is because he can get served.”

  “A valuable commodity in any market,” she said, and gave a little laugh.

  We came to the car, and Phil said, “This is it.”

  Shelly stopped and stared at the Duster. At first I thought she was going to refuse to get in. But she laid a mittened hand on it and declared, “This car has character.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s one of you,” I told Phil, who looked flattered to no end.

  I gazed up into the night sky, the ebb and flow of the clouds. The moon shone through a break, and my eyes traveled to the water tower. The Ranger hung there, motionless despite a breeze, as if

  (the cheerleaders were shredding the effigy of a Ranger)

  it were much heavier than anything as insubstantial as a few clothes stuffed with pillows.

  As if it were real.

  My heart jumped straight into jackhammer mode. My mouth gaped and I was half aware of Shelly twisting to see what I found so fascinating. Phil’s door thumped shut as another car rounded the corner of the parking lot, headlights on bright, sweeping over the lower third of the water tower. Bright, so bright. Illuminating the bloody meat that hung there.

  Shelly uttered a choked cry. A second later I did likewise. Because the nightmare was back in full swing again, and the millstone was back around my neck, pulling me down, down, down…

  And I knew with a horribly sinking feeling why my brother’s friend Bobby had never made it into the game.

  PART IV

  REVELATIONS

  Chapter 30

  Aaron and I had something new in common by the end of the Homecoming game. We’d both had a close friend die.

  Bobby Dennison had died in a particularly brutal manner Friday night. Someone had bludgeoned him, then cut through his back with a heavy knife, hacked through his ribs, and literally pulled his lungs out so they trailed down his back. After which this very strong and agile killer had tied a rope around his neck and hauled him up the water tower to put him on display.

  What the police found hardest to believe, though, was that no one seemed to have seen or heard a thing. As blatant and obscene as the crime was, as busy as the area was at the time, it somehow went unnoticed.

  The next night’s Homecoming Dance was cancelled, to nobody’s surprise.

  When we headed north back to school late Sunday afternoon, with scarcely a word passing between Phil and me, I wasn’t at all sorry to see the town dwindle to a speck in the rearview mirror. School wasn’t necessarily any safer than home, as I’d learned on the quad, but driving back was a placebo. It didn’t accomplish anything, yet I felt relief nonetheless. My only regret was that Aaron had to stay be
hind. Because whatever was after me seemed to be drawing closer to him, as well.

  So I leave it to you, Aaron, because I don’t know what else to do. And I guess to you too, Shelly. Because it’s wrecked you just as surely as it has us.

  Yet I had no idea how to explain it even to myself. Or how to protect us. So the best I could do at the moment was carry on. And survive.

  One final note, an ironic one. Three days after the Homecoming Dance was cancelled, Bobby Dennison was buried in the suit he’d bought for the occasion.

  The next Tri-Lakes dream came along shortly after we’d returned from that weekend. And this time, there was nary a tree or blade of grass involved.

  I found myself wandering up some steps whose paint peeled like sunburned skin, and only after I’d stepped into a large house did I realize it was Shelly Potter’s building. I didn’t know if I’d been invited or not, but being there seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  Outside her door … faint noise from within, a squeaking, steady and rhythmic. Of course I went on in. That’s what doors are for. Her hallway went on forever, the light muted and hazy and ethereal, the air rife with a cathedral silence … except for that squeaking.

  Her living room. The wicker chair spun as it had that lazy September day. And Shelly? She was prone on the couch. I couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her hair, trailing over the edge of one cushion. Someone lay between her legs, which were outstretched to receive him, and the source of the squeaking was a mystery no longer.

  That’s not right, I thought, shaking my head in sorrow. That’s just not right at all.

  I watched, completely a voyeur, every movement of theirs an exquisite torture to my heart. So I watched. Until her guest realized I was there, and raised himself up with a push of his arms.

  His mottled gray arms.

  Dennis Lawton didn’t look a bit better than the first time I’d seen him. In fact, he’d only gotten worse, and I wondered how he could see me, because his eyes were runny black holes by now. One of Shelly’s hands reached up to tenderly stroke his sunken cheek, and her fingernail tore a ragged hole so that his back teeth showed.

  But he only had eyes for me. So to speak.

  “What did you turn loose up there?” he asked in a voice more croak than human. “What did you turn loose?”

  Me? He was blaming me? Hey, I was just as much a victim as anybody else.

  I turned to run, to get while the getting was good, but the doorway had sealed over without a trace. No way out, no way home.

  And then Dennis Lawton was shuffling across the floor, leaving a trail of pieces of himself so he could find his way back to the couch, and then his arms were raising, and he was tearing great slabs of flesh from his chest and shoulders and back and legs, and they slapped onto the floor in dark heaps.

  And then the real wearer of Dennis Lawton’s skin was revealed … the dream-rider of that other Tri-Lakes, with his matted hair and blazing eyes and foul stench.

  “I am you,” he said, and reached for me.

  I awoke with a scream on the threshold of release.

  Chapter 31

  It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and everybody on the fourth floor of Scott was in a festive mood of major proportions. I was doing the best I could. Things at home had been quiet since Homecoming, and I couldn’t ask for anything more. So by seven-fifteen that Friday I was slapping on some Old Spice and getting ready to grab Phil and Ashley so we could hit the bars in search of Coors beer and maybe a meaningful relationship or two. Greg sat at his desk, entranced by a Coleco videogame console he’d bought on impulse earlier in the day. Fat spaceships zoomed across the TV screen.

  The phone jangled. Greg appeared not to notice as he battled asteroids or hemorrhoids or whatever, so I went for it. The voice on the other end belonged to Shelly Potter, and my heart did a little broad jump.

  I’d found my thoughts often straying to her in the past weeks, no doubt largely due to her starring role in the X-rated portion of the last Tri-Lakes dream. I’d idled away dull class hours and pre-sleep darkness with thoughts of her face, her wounded eyes, her own stake in the vortex that Tri-Lakes had become. Why shouldn’t I think of her? I often wondered. She’s pretty, she’s bright, she’s sensitive…

  “I didn’t call at a bad time, did I?” she said.

  “No. Oh no. This is fine.”

  And she’s also seven years older than you are, part of me answered. Several squares ahead in the game of Life. To look at it another way, seven years before, she could’ve been my babysitter.

  “I’ve run across something pretty interesting,” she said. “That is, if you’re interested in learning more about Tri-Lakes.”

  I shut my eyes. It always came around to Tri-Lakes, didn’t it? And until things were resolved one way or another, I feared it always would. A part of me still wanted to handle things by sticking my head into the sand; but once your head is out of sight, the next biggest target is your ass.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “You know that section of the paper called Timeline?”

  “Sure.” This was a daily feature that listed a few noteworthy local events for that date back through the town’s history.

  “This week it was my turn to look up everything for next week’s columns. Well, I’m here late doing it ‘cause it’s been a hectic week, and I got to the records of the events for 1940. And guess what popped up.”

  “Tri-Lakes,” I whispered.

  “We have a winner.” It sounded like she took a drink of something. “Three people died up there in a house fire. Back then the land was owned by someone who rented it out. Anyway, this house burns on, ummm, Monday, November twenty-fifth, and this widow and her two little girls go with it. There was a storm that night so the fire didn’t spread outside. Lots of lightning too, and since it was isolated, there were no witnesses to say for sure, but it was assumed the place was struck by lightning.”

  I began to feel a surge of excitement, of a nagging question suddenly answered. “Back in the summer, I was poking around out there and I found what looked like a foundation block. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and it was all grown over with weeds. Wow. Someone actually lived there once.”

  “Hold on, there’s more. There was a survivor. The woman’s brother-in-law. He was a student historian or something, around twenty-two. Claimed he was away from the house at the time, in town. That the house was pretty well gutted by the time he got back.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Joshua Crighton.” She spelled it for me, and I jotted it down on a notebook. “But there’s nothing about what happened to him afterward. And he’s not in the phone book.”

  “Damn.” I paused, and for a moment neither of us said a word. Then, “You know, Shelly, there’s really nothing that unusual about this, not like all the other stuff. It’s tragic, yeah, but maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  “Do you think that’s all there could be to it?”

  I sighed. Half of me wanted to jump to conclusions while the other half begged to sort it out rationally. But the latter had failed dismally all along, and so the former won. “Probably not.”

  “Look at it this way. On the surface, you’re right, there is nothing too weird about it. I almost passed it by until I realized where they were talking about. But think … the house was nearly leveled. Any evidence of something more may have burned up. If no one had a reason to suspect anything more, they probably wrote it off as lightning and called it quits. Back then, arson squads and autopsies couldn’t show what they can today.”

  “And you think this Crighton guy might be worth talking to?”

  “If we could find him. That’s a very big if, though.”

  Playing at Sherlock Holmes held little appeal for me. But on the off chance that, providing he was still alive after this long, he could tell something worth hearing, something to turn these cryptic fragments into a clearer picture, I had to try.

  “She
lly, is there any way you can find out about him? If he’s still alive, where he might be now?” It seemed impossible, trying to dig him up after more than forty-five years. On top of trying to maintain my grades.

  “If I have any brainstorms, I’ll let you know.”

  “Same here.”

  We made our goodbyes, and when I hung up, frustration was gnawing at me like a hungry rat. I turned around and looked at Greg, who hadn’t heard a word I’d said. He was still maneuvering a ship through a swarm of ugly weird things that looked pissed off. I left the room for our night out, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

  The best I recall, we got in sometime around four o’clock, which meant I’d gotten less than five hours of sleep when Shelly called again. Just barely enough time to sober up, and feel rotten about life and beer and the world in general.

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” she asked with a hint of amusement, knowing full well she had.

  I grunted. Let her take it however she wanted to. “What is it?”

  “I think I figured out a way to track down Joshua Crighton,” she said, sounding pleased with herself. “Maybe.”

  It was the quickest hangover cure I’d ever encountered.

  “Last night,” she said, “I got to thinking that if Crighton was a historian, he may have some books out. And if there’s a recent one with a little bio on the jacket, it might tell where he lives. At the very least, you could write in care of his latest publisher and hope that it gets forwarded.”

  I was grinning into the mouthpiece. “Did you check the library?”

  “I was there when they opened the doors. And I found one. It’s called Bloody Williamson: A Portrait of American Lawlessness. It’s like the definitive book on Williamson County. But it’s old, came out in 1943.”

  “Not too long after the fire.”

  “And it’s got a plain hard cover, too. No bio. But I asked the librarian if he had anything else out, and she said she didn’t know. She said it was possible, but they might not have it because it didn’t have the local focus of the Williamson book. She suggested that if I was really interested, I should check the card catalog of a college library.”