Coldwater

by Samuel Parker

  Kyle turned and ran as if his life depended on it. He would have screamed, but his voice was lost, lost in the chaos. He could see the truck through the leaves. He ran, harder and harder, until he made the clearing. Jumping in the truck, he slammed it into drive, spun around, and floored it back to the county road. James was almost ejected from his seat.

  “What are you doing?” James shouted.

  Kyle was mute. His face was drained of color and he was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Kyle . . . Kyle!”

  Kyle looked over at James. And with a ragged breath said, “He got out!”

  four

  MICHAEL HAD BEEN AWAKENED by the sound of a truck pulling into the woods, its exhaust system ruined years before. It belched smoke as it pulled in close to his location and stopped. He had heard the door of the truck open and shut and then saw movement through the trees. The man stalked the woods with the jittery movements of a spooked rabbit.

  Michael was too far from his burial site to get a good look at the man who had walked into the clearing, but not too far to sense the ominous feeling the man brought with him. He watched as the figure had walked up to the clearing, saw the empty grave, turned tail and ran.

  He heard the truck fire up and speed out of the woods, the dying, choking cough of its engine disappearing quickly as the forest returned to its unmolested state of quietness.

  The mysterious stranger must have been part of the group that brought him out here yesterday. Judging by the man’s skittish behavior, Michael knew it wasn’t their leader. The panic with which the man ran from the site when he realized Michael was no longer buried proved that he must have been one of Haywood’s weaker minions.

  Michael arose from his secluded spot on the riverbank, walked up the slope to the clearing, and looked down at the hole in the ground.

  He had come so close to dying. Closer than he ever had before.

  Yes, this was the closest he had come. By no right should he be standing now over his grave.

  The man had come out to check the status of their previous night’s work. It would be naive to believe that the men who had done this to him would rest on their laurels and leave him to nature. They would be back, most definitely now that they would know he was no longer buried in the earth.

  Michael looked down the path that led to where the truck had been parked. He slowly made his way toward the parking area, taking his time and readying himself to run back if another vehicle materialized. One never did.

  He walked into the opening and let the morning light hit his skin. Its warming effects energized him and brought his attention to the soreness of his face. Looking around, he saw ruts crisscrossed in the mud in every direction. It would have taken an expert tracker to figure out how many vehicles had made so many tracks, but it appeared as if the entire community of Coldwater had ventured out to witness his burial. An entire community complicit in the deed.

  He turned and walked back into the forest, back toward the river.

  The man who had ventured out here would head down to Coldwater and come back with the others. Others with more fortitude.

  They would search the woods for him.

  They would not stop until they found him. Michael knew this instinctively. Men who would go to such lengths to bury a man so far from civilization would go to great lengths to make sure he stayed there.

  Back at the relative safety of the riverbank, Michael weighed his options. Downstream was the easier path but most likely led to people, and people . . . well, he had no use for them anymore. He’d be running back into the embrace of murderers. Upstream would take him toward the north woods. With the cold fall air drifting in day by day, he wasn’t sure what would await him in that direction, but it would give him time to figure out where he was, and the downstream current supplied a quick escape route, should he run into anyone.

  Michael waded in up to his waist and started trudging upstream. The dogs, because they most assuredly would bring dogs, would have trouble following him if he used the river. The water was bitter cold, but he braved it as he walked, the sun on his shoulders, and ice on his legs, and the water flowing about him as if he were a minor inconvenience on its journey to the south.

  five

  KYLE DROVE THE TRUCK into Coldwater with the same reckless abandon as he did in leaving the woods. The silence he and James shared on the way out to the grave site was repeated on the way back to town as he thought through the ramifications of their discovery. In his mind he traced the level of his own complicity in the actions from the night before, his conscience ebbing and flowing between responsibility and absolution.

  “We have to tell Haywood,” James said with a low growl. His eyes were fixed forward in deep concentration. On good days, his voice was like a bag of gravel. Now it sounded like a rock tumbler.

  “Of course we do,” Kyle said. “I mean, it’s his show after all.”

  “Sure is.”

  “He’s the one who dragged us all out there, right? I mean, it was all him!”

  “Now just hold on. Don’t get that idea in your head. And definitely don’t say that in front of Haywood. He’d move to bury you out there next.”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have gone out there last night. Should have just stayed home.”

  “Too late now,” James said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Too late. You are part of this. Me too.” James looked out the window onto the quiet main street of Coldwater. “We’re all part of it.”

  Kyle turned east at the sole stoplight, drove one block, which was the width of the town, and pulled up to Haywood’s residence.

  It was a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch, better suited for a country house than one just off Main Street, but the house had stood well before the single stoplight was installed and a handful of people decided to stay put and set down roots. As the truck came in the driveway and parked, Haywood stepped out of the front door and stood on the porch, the screen door flapping behind him. Kyle and James approached the house, anxiety dripping off them like sweat.

  “What’s going on, boys?”

  “We got a problem,” Kyle said.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Well, you see, me and James went up to the . . . I mean . . . we drove up where we all, you know—”

  “We drove up to Springer’s Grove,” James interjected, “because Kyle here was driving me nuts with his paranoid delusions. I drove up with him so he could see that Michael was still buried. Bad news . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “He got out,” James said.

  “What do you mean, he got out?”

  Kyle found his words again. “Just that. I walked up the trail and the . . . the . . . grave . . . was dug up.”

  “Dug up?”

  “Well, not so much dug up, but dug out. He dug himself out. I don’t know how.”

  “You see him?”

  “No.”

  Haywood wiped his forehead and looked at Kyle and James. The man’s penetrating stare piercing through them, his mind someplace else, processing the news and creating a game plan.

  “Alright,” Haywood said. “It’s better than not knowing he’s loose.”

  Kyle could feel the tension release from his neck, like the times when he was a child and his father’s punishment for a stupid deed was unexpectedly lenient.

  “I want you two to go and gather up the others,” Haywood said. “Let’s meet up at Springer’s in an hour. I’ll get Murphy and his dog. Michael couldn’t have got very far.”

  “Sure thing,” James said.

  “I-I think I’ve d-done . . . ,” Kyle stammered. “I mean, I have some things I have to do with Tami today . . .”

  “Get in the truck, Kyle.” James grabbed his companion’s arm and spun him back to the vehicle.

  The two of them got in the cab and Kyle drove out of Haywood’s driveway much slower than when he had arrived. He pulled away reluctantly, becoming less eager to be a par
t of this situation with each passing minute.

  In the rearview mirror he could see Haywood staring after them until he made the turn at the stoplight. This was not the morning he had planned, but he had known—deep down inside he had known—that the events of the night before would haunt him. He just wasn’t expecting the ghosts to come calling so soon.

  six

  THE MEN WHO HAD DONE THIS to Michael had taken extra precautions and had planned out a method of execution with the utmost attention.

  Michael stopped into Gilly’s Pub twice a week. The pub was as old as the town and had taken up roots on the corner that housed the stoplight. The entrance to Gilly’s was through a glass door, down a long dark hallway adorned with cheap beer mirrors. In the back, the hallway exited to a large room with a wooden bar on one side. Several tables and booths filled the space. There was a small doorway that led to a semi-private room where the more uppity townsfolk held court.

  The night before, Michael had walked down the dark hallway and stood at the end of the bar. He would order the same thing each time—a whiskey sour, just one—and drink it quickly before heading back down the hallway and out into the street. This he did in an effort to establish a sense of normalcy, a way to connect, to be part of the American fabric, to do what all men do. The drink took a long time to discover. He had not acquired the taste for alcohol when all men do, when they sneak it out of their dad’s cabinet before heading off to the high school football game. He had missed that part of life.

  The bartender would see Michael and nod, prep the drink, and carry it over. Never a word spoken between them once the formula was right.

  This night, however, the drink was ready for him. Rather than being suspicious, Michael had taken it as a gesture of intimacy. He leaned against the bar and drank the mixture in a long, smooth motion. The warmth coated his throat and instantly filtered into his head. The taste was mildly off, but all too often that could be attributed to the pub’s ancient soda guns and the fact that they mostly spit out flat streams. He finished the drink and pushed away from the bar.

  The wall in front of him went in and out of focus before settling back to normal. His legs felt heavy and his arms loose, as if all the blood was pooling in his feet, leaving his upper half hollowed out and empty. Michael swooned and looked at the bartender, whose back was to him. He was playing at cleaning some glassware, but Michael knew that he was deliberately being shunned. His eyes went to the back of the pub, to the doorway of the private room, and he saw Haywood standing with several men behind him.

  “What did you do?” Michael asked, his words slurring together, his mouth and tongue no longer working together but each trying to manipulate sound in its own unique fashion. An energy inside him began to course with rage, and then, just as quickly, evaporated, the drug he had ingested putting the inner demon to sleep.

  Haywood just stood there, coming in and out of focus, his arms crossed.

  Michael turned toward the front door. The darkness was creeping in and the long hallway to the outside world was twisting and turning before him like an expanding kaleidoscope of demented shapes. He tried to move his foot. It felt like a brick as it slid across the floor. The tunnel before him extended to black singularity and the world vanished.

  Michael didn’t feel the floor come up to meet his face when he fell.

  He didn’t feel the blows of Haywood and his men as they pounced on his body.

  He didn’t feel a thing.

  Until he had awoken in the ground.

  Stories, the good ones that people remember, are a string of coincidences tied together until the improbable becomes true. How else could Achilles die from getting shot in the heel, or Chaucer happen to fall in with a crowd of interesting people? It is the unusual, not the ordinary, that gets retold. Ordinary is forgotten, dismissed, unnoticed. Ordinary is out of sight, out of mind. Michael was not ordinary.

  His childhood, his move back to Coldwater, all of it was illuminated like a marquee for all to see. The tale was so horrifyingly different from what the people of the town experienced in their own humdrum lives. It’s why he caught people’s gazes when he walked into town, his face hidden under the hood of his ratty coat, hands tucked into the pockets.

  They noticed.

  They always noticed. If Coldwater had been a large city, wives would have clung tighter to their husband’s arms and mothers would have scooped up their children when he passed. But Coldwater was small, and its townspeople drove past him on the road, their windows rolled up, their scowls showing behind glass.

  He was a leper in their minds, devoid of the disease.

  It was no surprise really that they had come for him. It was no surprise that the town wanted him dead, gone, erased from sight. What surprised him was that it had taken them so long. The fear-riddled population had actually summoned up the courage to act rather than continue to hide behind whispers and stares.

  When he had moved back to the property that he grew up on after being away for so many years, he knew he was not welcome. Haywood, the town’s sole backbone, had point-blank told him so. But there was no place left for Michael to go. He had cast his future aside so callously that when the state’s prison system had released him, there was nothing to do but go back to Coldwater, to the house that he left when he was just a kid, abandoned and forgotten.

  Though he had given the state his youth as they had demanded, the town would not be content that justice had been served. His younger years now gone, the town, and especially Haywood, made it known that his older years should have been forfeit too.

  And so they scowled at him, insulted at his audacity to populate the same patch of earth they called home.

  The outcast.

  The scourge of Coldwater.

  To the residents of the town, Michael was a constant reminder that evil was real and lurking in the dark.

  It made no difference that he was now an adult, a man whose childhood self was such a distant shadow as to be but a wisp of breath on the river behind him. He would be forever damned. Damned by his past actions and damned by the unforgiving memory of the town that sang hymns on Sunday and sharpened their knives on Monday.

  It was justice for him to be here at this time. Justice without mercy, for he knew better than anyone that mercy was earned, never given, and no act of contrition would ever pay the fee required.

  Michael continued trudging upstream, the current of the world pushing him down and away like the water that flowed against him.

  seven

  THE MEN GATHERED at the clearing at Springer’s Grove with less enthusiasm than the previous night. They were ordinary men now, not vigilantes, not a gang of desperadoes. They were simply men, men who hardly would have been thought capable of such a brutal act as drugging a man in a bar, dragging him out to the wilderness, and piling the earth on top of him.

  There were six of them, paired together by fate since elementary school seating assignments.

  James and Kyle.

  Frank and Earl.

  Clinton and Davis.

  Several of them moved slowly, their bodies bearing the same bruises they had inflicted on Michael. If any of them had compared scars and stories, they would have realized that each mark on their body corresponded to the location and severity of the punches they had landed on their victim the night before. Frank stepped out of his truck, sporting a black eye and squinting as if the sunshine was driving a migraine through his skull. Davis moved as if his ribs hurt.

  The men now stood silently and gave questioning looks to each other. They knew Michael was out of the grave, but none of them walked up the trail to see the site for themselves. Instead they waited for Haywood’s arrival and kept their own counsel.

  Haywood’s car pulled into the clearing, and he stepped out confidently, animating the men out of their dull congregation. Behind him, Murphy arrived in an old Dodge with his even older dog, Clyde, in the passenger seat.

  “So you’ve all heard, I’m sure,” Haywood sa
id.

  The men nodded.

  Haywood walked past them and on down the trail. The group followed his lead, and when they all got to the open pit, they formed a circle around it and waited for Haywood to speak.

  “As you can see, gentlemen, we have ourselves a situation. Now, some of you may start questioning what it was we did last night, whether it was right or wrong. Whether we sinned and are now reaping what we have sown. I’m going to ask you all to put away those thoughts. You can have those thoughts when you are tucked away in your beds at night. You can have those thoughts when you are old and gray. But for now, I need you all clearheaded and with me. You hear what I’m saying?”

  With slight movements and inarticulate grunts, the men consented.

  “Alright. Now, obviously we aren’t experienced killers. If we were, we wouldn’t be here right now. We’d be getting back to normal life and Michael would be yesterday’s business. But we aren’t. No one here is to blame. No one.”

  Haywood looked around the circle, making sure everyone understood him. The last thing he needed was for these guys to break and start slinging blame on him. He knew they would eventually, when the guilt of murder crept up on them, but today he needed them. After inspecting each of the men’s faces, he continued.

  “We have no idea how long he’s been out. Spread out and start looking for anything. Anything at all that might point us in the right direction.”

  The men divided up into their respective pairs and spread out into the woods. Kyle and James pointed themselves toward the clearing where the trucks were parked and gave mild effort in looking as if they were searching for clues. Frank and Earl headed south for the river. Haywood was with Murphy, who had his dog on the leash before him. The dog was as old and obese as Murphy, and even if the dog was able to pick up a scent, which Haywood doubted it was still capable of doing, it was unlikely the animal would last more than a hundred yards on a slow trot before it would be forced to lie down and take a nap to recover. Clinton and Davis, walking west, mumbled to each other about this and that.