by Rio Youers
He fell on his ass tramping back to the cruiser—his boot sinking through unpacked snow and knocking him off balance.
“Jesus Chrysler,” he said.
He’d landed in a snow bank so no damage done, although his ass was apt to be a little wet on the drive home. I held out my hand, smiling (always smiling) and he took it. With a grunt (from both of us), I helped him to his feet.
“What happened, Sheriff?” I asked. The question dropped from my lips the way Tansy had dropped into the snow—quickly, and with a little puff of surprise. I held on to his hand, feeling him try to pull back, but I squeezed hard. It put me in mind of how I’d held on to Kip Sawyer’s pen and not let go.
His eyes flickered. “I just fell, is all. It happens.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I don’t know—”
“What are you hiding?”
My heart was running fast and my body felt hot. He was either going to tell me or put a bullet in my head, then sweep me under the rug. I heard his leather glove creaking as I squeezed his hand harder.
“Let it go, Oliver,” he whispered, looking me in the eye with the intensity of a heavyweight boxer before a title bout. He jerked back his arm and his hand slipped out of mine, although I was left holding his glove.
“Let what go?”
He snatched his glove from my hand and slipped it on. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And he showed me that he could smile, too—a big ol’ go-fuck-yourself grin. I saw threads of chocolate in the gaps between his teeth. “The people of Point Hollow pride themselves on their unity of spirit and singular way of life. We’re the Small Town with a Big Heart. I admire your curiosity and tenacity, but while you’re looking for clouds, you’re missing the rainbow.”
He got into the cruiser and started it, then gave the engine a couple of impatient rips while he waited for me to get in. I did, trembling noticeably, my heart paddle-balling off my ribcage, and we didn’t share another word the whole ride home.
September 23, 2005.
Sometimes I wish I had someone to share my bed with. Someone I could curl up to and smell their hair and feel our nakedness pressed together like twins in the womb. Sometimes I just need to be held and loved. Amber used to kiss the corners of my eyes and I liked that. She told me I wept in my sleep, real thin tears, and that my top lip would pooch out like a baby’s. I liked that she told me—that she felt she could.
I just woke from a horrible dream. It’s already breaking apart in my mind. The cigarette smoke of my subconscious. Here’s what I can remember:
I walk into Sheriff Tansy’s office to tell him about the mountain and all the bodies inside because I know that’s the only way I will get answers. There’s music playing but it sounds like that crazy backward Beatles song, except for one word that punches through every now and again, different each time, and I realize it’s the first names of the children I have taken . . . DANIELLE . . . RYAN . . . WALTER . . . over and over, running through them all. Tansy sits at his desk eating a jelly doughnut, and all the jelly is spattering out and dripping down his whiskery chin and the front of his shirt. His badge is made of paper, and instead of the word SHERIFF stamped in the middle there is a smiley face drawn in yellow crayon. All of a sudden I am carrying a heavy suitcase that I heave onto his desk. He says “Whoa” as the weight of it causes his desk to lift on one side and some of his important paperwork helter-skelters to the floor. I look down and see that the pages are blank. I snap open the suitcase and inside are hundreds of photographs. “What in Jesus?” he says, and I say to him, “Here’s what’s wrong with your town, you son of a gumball,” and I empty that suitcase full of photographs all over his desk . . . VICTORIA . . . CONNOR . . . DANIELLE . . . and he kind of pushes back as if it’s boiling water I’ve poured all over, even lifting his boots off the floor, and the jelly doughnut falls from his fingers and hits the floor with a sound like a bug hitting a windshield. They are photographs of the skeletons in the mountain, all of them, hundreds of them, but the first photograph the sheriff picks up in his sticky fingers is of CONNOR curled into a dry little ball. The sheriff’s eyes grow huge. He picks up the photographs of RYAN and then WALTER and then VICTORIA and looks at me. “We got a nice little place for you downstate,” he says. “Sing-Sing Correctional. You’re going to be there for a long time, Oliver. And without anyone to feed it the mountain is going to boom and boom and you’re going to hear it forevermore, night and day, driving you insane, and you’re going to pray for death.” I walk to the window and look out. Abraham’s Faith is too big. It’s closer. Coming for me . . . DANIELLE . . . RYAN . . . and I try to scream but no sound comes out. “Sing-Sing,” Sheriff Tansy says. I look at him. He is holding a skull. A child’s skull. His tongue flicks out and rolls around its eye socket and there is jelly inside . . . WALTER . . . VICTORIA . . . CONNOR . . . and I wake up and wish there was somebody beside me but know/no I am alone.
March 12, 2006.
I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent trawling the Internet for information about Point Hollow. I almost always come up empty, but every now and then . . .
The following is cut and pasted from a site called American Memories:
In the weeks before she passed away, my grandmother shared many memories with me, and I’m happy to say that most were happy indeed. However, one memory was so disturbing, and told with such emotion, that it saddened me to know that she had carried it with her for so long. I share it here to unburden myself, although I can’t bring myself to write all the grisly details.
She grew up in a small town in upstate NY called Point Hollow. I recall the delightful glint in her eye when she told me how she used to stand in the river and try to catch fish in her under-drawers, and that she spent many a sunshiny afternoon chasing rabbits across the hillsides around her home. Her expression darkened, however, when she told me about the mountain that overlooked the town. She claimed it was haunted, and that it made people do terrible things. I would have thought nothing of it, except she said it with such conviction (and fear) that her belief was undoubted.
But why would she believe it, especially given the benefit of wisdom? (And Gran was extremely wise; she kept her marbles until the very end, I can assure you.) Well, a traumatic event can impact the way people think and feel for the rest of their lives. Some people find God, and I’m sure that some people can lose Him, too.
The traumatic event that Gran witnessed and shared with me so many years later would test anyone’s faith. It was a regular Sunday in 1923 and my Gran, only five years old, was in the same place as just about everybody else that day: in church. She wore her prettiest dress and had a flower in her hair, and she told me she felt like the most beautiful little girl in the world. The minister had just started his sermon when one of the windows smashed and a bottle came crashing in . . . only the bottle was filled with gasoline and stoppered with a burning rag. It landed near the front pews and exploded into flame. The chaos was immediate, and at this point I’ll censor my grandmother’s account. Suffice it to say that the wood frame building burned quickly, and not everybody got out in time. The doors had, in fact, been barricaded, and it took several men – using one of the pews as a battering ram – to smash it open.
Eighteen people were burned alive.
They caught the man who committed this atrocity, but Gran didn’t know what happened to him. She either forgot or never knew to begin with. She does remember seeing him, though. She said that he was raving mad, and that he’d deliberately burned off most of his skin—perhaps to punish himself. She also said that he kept screaming, over and over, something about being “touched by a bird.”
Following Gran’s passing, I tried to research this terrible incident, but was unable to find any information. I wrote to the library in Point Hollow, but never received a reply. I also searched online, of course, but without luck. To this day, I don’t know if it
really happened, or if it was something my grandmother dreamed, but *believed* happened. What I *do* know is how genuine her fear was when she told me about the mountain. I have never seen her so afraid. I also know that— because of this—Point Hollow isn’t high on my list of places to visit.
Thanks for letting me share. Love the site, btw.
Elizabeth S., TN.
I had to take a long walk after I read this. Breathe the trees. Get my shit together. I walked with my back to Abraham’s Faith and considered evil: a thing of the cosmos, untenable, but as real as rain, and looking—always looking—for harbour. I imagined the earth billions of years ago, new-formed and lifeless, with good and evil spinning around it like the rings of Saturn. I saw the knuckle of rock that would one day become Abraham’s Faith, drawing on thunder and lightning, suckling evil from the cosmos and swelling to ruinous heights, dark and blind and hunched. A rook on Earth’s gravestone.
I turned around and stared at its slick, hated face.
“You’ve always been evil, haven’t you?”
It felt as though I had discovered something it didn’t want me to discover. Elizabeth S. from Tennessee had confirmed that there had been others before me. But how many? Did the mountain tell Jack Braum to grab his Winchester and paint Main Street as red as the stripes in the American flag? Did it tell thirteen young townspeople to cut thirteen lengths of rope and take a necktie social in the woods beside Rainy Creek?
The pieces are starting to slide together but the picture is far from complete. Hoping for more information, I tried to get in touch with Elizabeth S. through the American Memories website. (The gist of my e-mail: I’m from Point Hollow. Maybe we can help each other fill in the blanks.) I received a reply this morning: Mr. Wray, I forwarded your e-mail to Elizabeth. She thanks you for your interest, but insists that, with respect, this is not a matter she is comfortable discussing with Internet Strangers. She is sure you will understand. Thank you for visiting American Memories. Share with us again! It was the reply I expected, but obviously not the one I wanted.
I’d ask around, but seriously . . . what good would it do?
March 14, 2006.
I saw my father today. I tried being nice to him. I fed him his goddamn tomato soup, didn’t I? I spooned it into his gap-toothed mouth and listened to every hideous slurping sound. It was like a drain clogged with shit, gurgling and spitting, and I never said a word. Not once. He jutted out his chin when he’d finished, wanting me to wipe his face, but I put the brakes on the TLC at that point. I handed him a napkin and he looked at me with sad eyes, so I told him that wiping his face was only one step removed from wiping his ass, that I’d put a bullet in his head before that ever happened—that I’d put a bullet in mine.
I tried to be nice because I wanted to ask him about the town. I wondered if he knew anything about Jack Braum, the church fire, or the suicide pact in the woods. I took away his soup dish, wheeled him in front of the TV, put on Days of Our Lives, and sat through it with him. Then I flicked off the TV, angled his wheelchair toward me, and asked:
“What is this town hiding?”
I didn’t expect to get much sense from a man who collects his boogers on a piece of five-ply chipboard he calls The Green Monster. He started to make a “Yuggh-yuggh-yuggh” sound and his glass eye sagged in its socket as if whatever supported it had partially collapsed. He’s only sixty-three, my old man, but you would think him ninety-three. I guess he inhaled too much Agent Orange in ’Nam. “Yuggh-yuggh,” he said, and there was a long runner of spit dangling from his lower lip. I called him a fucking disgrace. He stopped and looked at me—sucked that spit right into his mouth with the same sound he had made while eating the tomato soup—and then said with certain and chilling clarity:
“When you were three months old I put a pillow over your face. I wish to God I’d kept it there.”
The mist was brief but velvety red and I grabbed my jacket from where I’d thrown it over the back of the armchair, balled it into a pillow, and pressed it against his face. He fought as hard as he was able, flailing weakly with his arms, jerking his legs so frantically that his wheelchair started to roll across the floor and I had to put my boot behind one wheel to keep it in place. I heard him trying to scream and watched the top of his bald head turn from freckled eggshell to . . . well, tomato red. It didn’t take long for the fight to drain from him. His legs started to tremble and his left arm sagged like his glass eye. I took the jacket away at the last moment and he pulled a desperate rip of air into his lungs. He exhaled like a horse whinnying, spittle flying from his purple lips, boogers popping from his nostrils (the Green Monster will have to do without those particular trophies, but there will be many more, I’m sure). His hands clasped the wheelchair’s armrests and his good eye rolled every which way, as if registering the minutia of a life he was still living.
“Son of a . . . fuuugh . . . beeeeeesh.”
I was disgusted with him. Myself, too. I told him I hated him. His prosthetic eye had rolled back in his skull so that only the bottom of the painted iris could be seen, but his good eye zeroed on me. I have seen pictures of my father as a younger man and we look alike, we really do, but I hope I never look like he did right then. An unloved doll. A wry portrait. He called me a hellbound cunt. I called him a vile, worthless cocksucker, then put on the jacket I had almost killed him with, and left.
So much for nice.
June 9, 2006.
More gold on the Internet. I found it by chance, panning through gigabytes of bullshit, my eyes trained to recognize the shape of the words “Point Hollow” and pick them off the page no matter how fast I scrolled. But I found something else: a photograph. I zipped past it to begin with but then my brain slammed on the brakes and I scrolled back.
The quality is not good (it’s an old photograph) but I can see what I need to: the mouth of the cave. My cave. And in the foreground a man standing with three terrified children. He has a creepy, fishhook smile. Two of the children are clutching each other, but all three are crying.
I can’t write anymore for now. This photograph has thrown me out of fix. The man unnerves me. It’s his face. His grin. Tomorrow I’ll copy and paste it into the journal, and see if I can find out more about him.
Mr. Fishhook.
Original me.
June 14, 2006.
One of the little girls in the photograph is wearing a white dress and dark socks. She is also wearing a bracelet on her left wrist. I went to the mountain and looked for her—spent seven hours sifting among the bones. So many bodies crumbled when I touched them. Their clothes, too. Like wet paper.
I searched the depths of the cavern—found damp culverts and recesses I had never seen before, filled with small bones. My throat was thick with the dust I inhaled and I have blisters on my fingertips from scrabbling along the slick stone.
I found her just when I was about to give up. Her ribcage had fallen inward. She had one sock on, clogged with grime, down around her ankle. The bracelet was looped over the fragile bones of her fingers, swollen with corrosion. But it was her, and I knew for certain that the photograph I had pulled from the Internet had been taken moments before she was led into the darkness of Abraham’s Faith.
I was wrong about her dress. It was yellow, not white.
August 3, 2006.
I went out with Sheriff Tansy again today. The first time in eighteen months. It was actually okay. We started off talking about sports and work (briefly; I know nothing about sports, he knows nothing about work), and then our conversation turned to common ground: Point Hollow. He was as forthcoming on the subject as I’ve ever known him to be. He told me flat-out that certain incidents in the town’s past had been kept from the outside world—that there were remarkably few such incidents, all things considered. There were no records, and the townspeople (those who remembered) held their silence.
“So you just forget i
t ever happened?” I asked.
Tansy winked. “We’re in this together, my friend.”
I wondered—without official records, and with the town locked in silence—how much the sheriff actually knew. How much anybody knew, given that these “incidents” were swept under the rug a long time ago. I decided that I probably knew more than him, and was almost certain that he had no idea about the children in the mountain.
“I should point out,” Tansy added, puffing out his chest as if to accentuate the badge, “that these few blights were long before my time. I haven’t had to cover anything up, and God pray I’m never put in that position. So far, Oliver my friend, I’m batting a thousand. Nothing has happened on my watch.”
And I thought, If only you knew.
April 5, 2007.
I don’t see much of Kip Sawyer these days; he’s as fragile as the bones in the mountain. One hearty gust of wind and he’s apt to separate like a handful of confetti. Which isn’t surprising when you consider the town threw him a 100th birthday party three years ago (not knowing if it actually was his 100th birthday, but figuring it was ballpark-close). Poor old Kip is completely blind now. No more crosswords in the sun. He can’t walk, has difficulty articulating, needs a hearing aid, and wears a nasal cannula plugged into an oxygen tank that he carries in a leatherette satchel, usually drooped over the push handles of his wheelchair. He’s basically a heartbeat in a very old shell, and I wonder if his mind is as sharp as it used to be. I almost hope not, for his sake. That must be like trying to fly in a cage.
I see him occasionally, though. His helper will push him around town when the weather allows, and sometimes he’ll sit on the corner of Pussy Willow Road, waving at passing cars. I have considered asking him about the town again (it’s been ten years since our discussion in Blueberry Bush park) but have refrained; a man so advanced in life isn’t likely to have a change of heart. Still, he was the first person I thought of asking when I found the photograph on the Internet. Kip would have been alive when it was taken—not much older than the three terrified children, depending on when it was taken, and how old Kip really is. He might recognize one or all of them. He might even recognize the man with the fishhook smile.
