by Rio Youers
Matthew scrolled to Bobby’s home number on the BlackBerry, knowing it was useless but dialing anyway. He heard the phone ringing inside the house. No one to answer it.
“What the hell, Bobby?”
He hung up and stepped off the porch, thinking that Bobby had either forgotten (not likely, given how excited he was), or that something had upset the plan. An emergency, perhaps. As he pondered what to do, Bobby’s neighbour shuffled to the edge of his garden and called over:
“Any idea what happened?”
Matthew looked at him, an old man dressed in a string vest, jockey shorts, and a fedora. Just another of Point Hollow’s peculiar residents. Although, to be fair, it was too hot to wear much more.
“What do you mean?”
“The police were here,” the neighbour said. “Deputy Sheriff Masefield. I don’t know what for, but Moira left with him. About an hour ago.”
“The police?” Matthew asked. Too many thoughts tumbled through his mind, and none of them had a happy ending. “Moira . . . is that Bobby’s mother?”
The neighbour nodded.
“And Bobby wasn’t with her?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Doesn’t sound good.” Matthew muttered.
“Say again?”
Matthew shook his head. “Nothing.”
“I guess you don’t know what happened, huh?”
“No, I . . .”
The neighbour flapped a hand at Matthew and trudged back inside. His front door slammed behind him, and for long seconds the world was heavy and silent, until a bird called and a child laughed, and then Matthew heard his sneakers dragging along the path as he walked back to the rental. He got behind the wheel, but just sat there, with too many thoughts crowding his mind. All were bleak. He shook his head and told himself not to think the worst, then started the car and drove back to the hotel.
———
He was sure that something had happened to Bobby. In this heat, with his heart, it was the most likely explanation. He spent the next hour pacing his hotel room, wondering what he should do. At seven-thirty he called Bobby’s house again. Still no reply.
What the hell is going on, Bobby?
News travels fast in a small town. Matthew went to the Rack because he thought the grapevine would be in full swing. He grabbed a seat at the bar, ordered a draft beer, and was able to piece together what had happened by the time it was served.
“—Ernie Fellows found him on Tall Pine Way, lying there like roadkill—”
“—just crazy to be bicycling in this heat, what with his ticker—”
“—heard it took four guys to lift him into the back of the ambulance. Even the sheriff had to break a sweat—”
Oh Jesus, Bobby. What were you thinking?
Matthew sat silently, sipping his beer but not really tasting it. He felt brittle, as if, with too sudden a movement, he would fall from the barstool in pieces, to be swept away at the end of the night with the dust, the peanut shells, and the beer labels peeled from their bottles. It wasn’t grief, exactly—he didn’t think he knew Bobby well enough to fully grieve—but a hole had opened inside him, and it was cold and wretched, spilling emotions he had no name for. So he sipped his tasteless beer and filled the cold place with memories: the chubby kid with the raggedy Mets cap on his head, swapping comic books, building rafts and dens. Fast forward twenty-six years: Bobby, still with the Mets cap, guzzling a pitcher of Pepsi, crouching behind the plate—Pop!—as Matthew threw an imaginary fastball, talking about TV shows and superheroes, taking him through the woods to see the whitetail gathered in the clearing. Hugging Bobby close, feeling the curve of his body and the thud of a heart that was no longer beating.
Tears glistened in his eyes and he wiped them away with the edge of his thumb. The locals talked. Someone laughed, and a woman with angry-red hair fed quarters to the juke and played the Eagles.
———
One beer was all he could manage. The Rack soon filled with uncomfortable sound. Not a fitting environment for whatever emotion he was feeling. He slipped from the stool and left quietly. The streets were touched by long shadows. The bruised sky reflected his mood.
Matthew crossed Main, thinking he’d go back to the hotel and catch an early night, maybe watch TV until he fell asleep. He had no enthusiasm for anything else. Tomorrow he’d decide whether to stay the remainder of the week—as planned—or return to the city, face Kirsty, and get the divorce ball rolling. Point Hollow wouldn’t be the same without Bobby. It might even be unpleasant, with its spiny small-town attitude.
Bobby . . . Jesus.
And suddenly everything hit him. Not just Bobby, but a bombardment of the last two years. Even longer: the darkness inside him, the repressed memories, the nights he’d woken up screaming. And, of course, Kirsty. Her abuse. His sadness. It crashed against him and he wavered on the sidewalk, cold tears shining on his face in the bruised light.
———
He sat in the doorway of Hudson Holiday Homes (which used to be Norris Drug, back in the day) with his head in his hands, and didn’t look up until he sensed red and blue light pulsing around him. There was a moment’s disorientation before realization dawned. Oh God, not now. Please, not now. He lifted his head and peered into the swirling lights. Sure enough, Sheriff Tansy’s cruiser rumbled at the side of the road.
“Unless you’ve got business in that doorway,” the sheriff said, “I suggest you make like a bread truck and haul buns. You ain’t in New York City now.”
Matthew sighed and nodded. “Sorry, Sheriff.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“I just . . .” Matthew stood up and stepped onto the sidewalk. The lights moved around him, as harsh and accusatory as pointing fingers. “I just needed to sit for a while. Get my head together.”
“That so?” The sheriff flicked off the lightbar and stepped out of the cruiser. His boots made hollow sounds on the sidewalk. Matthew looked away from him—up at the sky. Dark blue, sprayed with starlight. The mountains in the west had a burned outline. He wondered how long he’d been sitting in the doorway with his head in his hands. He felt a little steadier now, but Sheriff Tansy was the last person he wanted to talk to.
“Tough day?” the sheriff asked.
“Something like that,” Matthew said.
Sheriff Tansy nodded. He planted his hands on his hips and glared at Matthew, his eyebrows meeting, teeth showing. Matthew glanced away again, perhaps hoping the sheriff would simply nod, get into his cruiser, and drive away. But he didn’t. He continued to stare, saying nothing. It felt as though his steely eyes were trained on pressure points, gradually weakening Matthew, like an android in a sci-fi movie.
“Again, I’m sorry for—”
“Why are you here?” the sheriff asked. Matthew wondered if he waited for people to begin talking, just so he could interrupt them.
“Here?”
“Point Hollow. Why did you come back?”
None of your business, Matthew thought. He felt himself trembling as the sheriff stared at him, and made an extra effort to pull his shoulders square and meet his stern gaze.
“Am I doing something wrong?”
“Not as far as I know.” The sheriff opened his hands. His impressive chest swelled as he inhaled. “I’m just a curious old soul. Comes with the badge.”
Matthew nodded, swallowed hard.
“I recall you saying that you needed to get out of the city for a few days.” The sheriff breathed on Matthew. An old, unpleasant smell. “I don’t know your reasons, and I don’t care to know. None of my concern. But you could have gone anywhere. Why Point Hollow?”
“Because it called to me,” Matthew said. The words spilled from his mouth as suddenly as they formed in his mind, giving him no time to ponder whether or not they were true, but as soon as he spoke
them, he realized they were. Point Hollow had called to him, subtly, through his turmoil. A resonance accompanying every dark thought.
Sheriff Tansy took a step back. Matthew thought he would ridicule this response—too deep for him to understand. He didn’t, though. He shuffled his feet and lowered his eyes, suddenly uncertain.
He knows what I mean, Matthew thought. He feels it, too.
“Called to you, huh?” Sheriff Tansy said. He looked at Matthew again. “Well, that may be so. But seems to me you brought a trunkload of bad luck with you.”
“Bad luck?”
“Misfortune. Black clouds. Bad mojo.” Sheriff Tansy shrugged. “Call it what you want, but you can’t deny it. First the deer, and now Bobby Alexander.”
“Bobby was my friend.”
“That I don’t doubt.” Sheriff Tansy said. His nostrils flared, the map of burst capillaries almost glowing. “He was my friend, too. A friend to the town, by God, and we’re all sorry as heck that he’s gone.”
Matthew doubted that was true, but said nothing.
“You see, we’re used to blue skies here in Point Hollow,” the sheriff continued. “By which I mean a simple, peaceful lifestyle. No black clouds. No bad mojo. I get a bad taste in my mouth whenever somebody comes along and upsets our little applecart.”
“I didn’t mean to upset any—”
“Makes me . . . uneasy.” The sheriff sneered.
Matthew sighed and ran a hand down his face. So tired. So much emotion.
“Might just be best,” the sheriff said, “for you to move along. Take your bad mojo back to the city, where it belongs, and don’t come back any time soon.”
You were reading my mind, Sheriff, Matthew thought. I can’t wait to blow this freaky little taco stand.
“I’ll even give you an escort as far as the seventeen,” Sheriff Tansy continued. He grinned and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “We don’t want you hitting any more deer, do we?”
“Very considerate of you,” Matthew said wryly, and now it was his turn to sneer—a slight flare of the upper lip, but Tansy saw it and bristled, stepping toward Matthew and looming over him again.
“Go home,” he said. Almost a growl.
“Actually, I . . .” Matthew stopped. He was about to say, I plan on leaving first thing tomorrow morning, and you don’t have to worry about me coming back. But he remembered something Bobby had said last night (so surreal now—last night, when Bobby had been alive . . . breathing, thinking, smiling), sitting on the porch amid the scent of wild honeysuckle and the sound of children’s laughter. Bobby had told him that he didn’t have any friends, that only his mother had visited when he’d been recovering in hospital. Matthew had squeezed his arm, able to relate. I’m your friend, he had said, as much to comfort himself as Bobby.
Matthew blinked, sighed, and retreated a step. He smelled the sheriff’s breath again, damp and bitter.
“He was my friend,” Matthew said. He imagined Bobby lying in his hospital bed, a single Get Well Soon card on the nightstand, a single bunch of flowers. He imagined the empty chair in the corner, and Bobby’s brave smile. Tears flooded his eyes and he wished, more than anything in the world, that he had known Bobby then, because that chair would not have been empty. He would have sat with Bobby and talked to him about the Mets and Justice League and whether or not the Dawn of the Dead remake was better than the original.
“Go home,” Sheriff Tansy said again.
And if nobody had visited Bobby in hospital, how many would go to his funeral? How many would look in on Mrs. Alexander to see if she needed anything—to help her while she grieved? Matthew imagined the funeral: a scattering of flowers, with Mrs. Alexander standing beside her son’s coffin, weeping while the Reverend’s eulogy echoed in an empty church.
You’ll probably forget about me when you get back to New York, Bobby had said.
No, I won’t, Matthew had replied, looking him in the eye, meaning it.
He wiped away his tears and looked at Sheriff Tansy.
“I won’t,” he said.
The sheriff’s grey eyes burned. He inhaled, expanded, his brow a latticework of furrows. A car slipped by on Main, slowing as the driver rubbernecked. Crickets whirred in the long grass and the Rack’s windows flashed, music pulsing like the vein in Sheriff Tansy’s temple.
“I’m going to stay for Bobby’s funeral,” Matthew said. “Then I’ll leave.”
“That’s not until the end of the week,” Tansy said.
“Doesn’t matter.” Matthew looked at him and nodded. “I can help Mrs. Alexander with funeral arrangements, and with anything else she needs.”
“She’s got a whole townful of people to help her.”
Matthew thought of the empty chair beside Bobby’s hospital bed. The single Get Well Soon card. He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“She doesn’t need your help, city boy.”
“Bobby was my friend,” Matthew said again. His palms were slick with sweat, his heart beating fast. “I’m going to stay for his funeral, and I’m going to make sure his mother has all the support she needs.”
Sheriff Tansy stared at him, boring into those pressure points. Matthew reached deep and held his gaze, despite wanting to turn away—run away forever. But he wouldn’t turn his back on Bobby. And he wouldn’t give Tansy the satisfaction of chasing him away. Matthew would leave in his own sweet time. He’d been bullied for too long.
The sheriff clapped one tough hand on Matthew’s shoulder, then leaned close to him and whispered, “This isn’t your town anymore.”
Matthew said nothing. He swallowed hard and felt a cold sweat break on his legs.
“I’ll be keeping my eye on you.” Sheriff Tansy nodded once, then stepped back and grinned—a stained and unfriendly display of teeth—before turning and getting into his cruiser. He started it with an impressive roar, gunned the accelerator a couple of times, and pulled away.
Matthew watched the cruiser rip out of sight, then exhaled—a wheezy, jittery breath that left him feeling empty.
Looks like I’m staying the rest of the week. No doubt that he’d rather be blazing south toward the Big Apple, throwing a big fuck you at Point Hollow in his rearview mirror, but something more important had intervened.
Matthew stood in the streetlight with his head down, feeling the emptiness inside him fill with the woe of having to endure Point Hollow for a few more days. But he would do it. For Bobby. For himself.
I’m your friend.
He would be true to his word.
———
Something he had said to Sheriff Tansy followed him into sleep. Because it called to me. This reply, from nowhere, coloured his dream.
Come softly, Point Hollow said, quivering at the end of the Dead Road. He drove the rental, battered and clattering, splashed with the deer’s blood. Abraham’s Faith hulked beyond the town, covering the sky. Come softly. He put his foot down and trembled past the sign that read: THE PEOPLE OF POINT HOLLOW WELCOME YOU. STAY A WHILE. Sheriff Tansy was on the radio: “That’s seventy thousand amps of pure adrenaline bolting through your system. Now all you have to do is channel it, push it all into one bullet, and let yourself glow.” From somewhere else he heard laughter that sounded like Kirsty’s. He looked over his right shoulder, expecting to see her, but the deer was sprawled along the backseat, broken and bleeding and blinking its terrified eye. Come softly. He looked at Point Hollow, at the mountain, and then saw Bobby standing beside a sign that read: POPULATION ???? Bobby smiled and waved at him, and Matthew saw, scratched beneath the row of question marks, the words: ALL DEAD CHILDREN.
Come softly.
The car hissed and rumbled toward town.
From Oliver Wray’s Journal (III)
Point Hollow, NY. August 4, 2010.
I slept well, my body taking to the softness of a real be
d after three days in the wild. If I dreamed I don’t remember. If the mountain called to me, I didn’t hear. I went deep, and it was heaven.
Pain woke me: my sunburned body, the deep cut in my right foot. I moved tenderly from between the sheets and eased my wounds with a cool shower. My foot still bled, and following a delicate examination I decided to see Dr. Alex, who would clean and dress it properly, and ensure there was no infection.
But first . . .
Disarray. Evidence—reminders—of yesterday. My study in tatters. It forced fingers into my mind that pried and pulled. I couldn’t face Dr. Alex, or anybody, with this chaos in my corner, so spent an hour putting everything right. The only thing I couldn’t fix was the dent in the filing cabinet that Bobby made when he crashed into it. I removed the drawers and tried popping out the dent from inside, and although I improved it, there is still a deep crease in the panel (I can feel the same crease in my mind, and it hurts). Of course, I ordered another filing cabinet, to be delivered ASAP.
Unsettled, still in pain, I drove into Point Hollow to see Dr. Alex. I sat in the waiting room, closed my eyes, and imagined an icicle melting. My woes were the cold, steady drips. After a stretch of time that could have been as long as an hour, Dr. Alex called me in and took care of my injuries. He asked what I’d been doing (the gash in my right sole is bad, but both feet are raw, my palms, too—that’s what comes of walking around on all fours). I told him that I’d been working around the house. An unsatisfactory reply, but he didn’t question me further. He Steri-stripped and bandaged my foot, prescribed Vicodin for my pain, and Silvadene for the second-degree burns on my back and shoulders.
“You need to take it easy in this heat,” he warned. “We’ve already had one fatality in town. We don’t want any more.”
“Fatality?” My eyes were wide. Baby-innocent.
“You didn’t hear?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Bobby Alexander died yesterday.”
“Bobby?” I imagined him lying on a slab with a shattered jaw and the skin scraped from his arms and belly, his heart motionless and refrigerator-cold. I shook my head and blinked my baby eyes. “That’s . . . that’s terrible.”
