Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “You went into the trees.”

  “I thought I was going to throw up.”

  “Why not use the bathroom?”

  He sighed. “I was embarrassed. I thought it would be more private in the woods. Besides, when you’re drunk—”

  “Okay, and that’s why your footprints were out there.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And was that it?”

  The old man paused for a moment, his eyes glassy and wide. “There was someone else out there, too.”

  “James Airie?”

  “No.” He smiled a bit. “It was a kid, a teenager.”

  “Did you ever tell the police about that?”

  “I told my lawyer. I don’t remember if we—”

  “What was the kid doing?”

  “He was just sort of hiding, I think. Lurking around.” Telliman rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I walked back out of the woods, and I think—I mean, I know people saw me do that. And I guess the little girl had either disappeared by then or something, because two days later I had the police at my door.”

  “Jerry Cleveland.”

  “What a moron.”

  “He said you thought the father did it.”

  Telliman chuckled, the gray skin of his neck jiggling slightly. “Yeah.”

  “What made you say that?”

  “He never came after me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He never tried to threaten me, kill me, beat me up. I would have, I mean, if it were my daughter.”

  “Which means—”

  “Which means a couple of things. One, that he knew I didn’t do it. And two, that he knew she was gone forever. Think about the way people act when their kids are missing. It’s different from when they’re dead. I’m telling you. You see it all the time on television, the hope in their eyes…”

  Katherine nodded. “Jerry Cleveland agreed with you about the father.”

  “Really?”

  “And James Airie has killed himself.”

  Bryce Telliman sighed. His slapped his hands on his knees. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink, Katherine? I have lots of different kinds of tea.”

  “I’m sure,” Katherine said.

  “How’d he do it?”

  “He flew his little airplane into the ocean.”

  “His little airplane,” Telliman repeated.

  Katherine realized now that she hadn’t taken her jacket off. It was getting warm in here. “Did you say you had beer?” she asked.

  It almost never rang. She was in her Rabbit on the way back from the city when her cell phone rang. It was Dr. Lennox, saying, “There is something, Kate.”

  Expectantly, Katherine asked, “What? What is it?”

  “I thought it was nuts,” Greg said, “I thought I was nuts, but I took a second look at the blood test we gave Pilot Airie when he came in here.”

  “And?”

  “And naturally, we only check for certain things.”

  “And?”

  “And I had the lab take a look, at great expense, mind you, but it’s there in the test. It’s in there.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “This stuff is not easily available. It’s new. It’s not entirely tested, as far as I know.”

  Katherine held the phone to her ear and gripped the steering wheel tightly with her other hand. She had known it was possible, had known, in fact, that it was even likely. But now that it was true, she didn’t know how to feel. She took a deep breath. “This is getting weirder and weirder every second,” she said into the phone.

  She could hear Greg Lennox sucking his teeth. “I’m going to check and see if any of this stuff was given to Eric Airie. I know a sales rep from the pharmaceutical company that makes it.” Dr. Lennox was grim. “We have to remember, Katherine, it’s not the kind of drug that would kill someone, even if he did—”

  “It’s worse,” she said. “It’s the kind of drug that makes you psychotic.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll wait.” Katherine pulled up to a light. “Remember the shoelace?”

  Dr. Lennox was quiet.

  “The one Pilot said was from the shoe he found, from the evidence?”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s not real.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know if he has any actual evidence or not. In other words, Eric may have been successful in making Pilot crazier than he meant to. He may have made Pilot so crazy it came back to haunt him.”

  Dr. Lennox asked, “Are you going to see Eric?”

  “I’m going to avoid him, if I can.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, Kate.” Dr. Lennox’s tone was unconvincing. “Don’t be frightened. This is between the family, and Eric wouldn’t, I’m sure—he wouldn’t do anything, of course. He’s a doctor.”

  “Maybe there really isn’t any evidence at all,” Katherine said, more to herself than to Dr. Lennox. “Maybe Pilot’s using it as a story to flush his brother out, to make him do something—”

  “That would be pretty—”

  “Sane,” Katherine said. “Wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In a way, I guess it would.” He paused, then said, “I’ve never seen a family unravel like this.”

  “They started unraveling twenty years ago,” Katherine said. “Now it looks like everything’s raveling back.”

  Amazingly, it was Christmas Eve.

  Eyes wide open, I was lying in bed. The only light coming in was a sliver of yellow driveway light through the mini-blinds, and these sheets were too fucking new, I guess, or simply hadn’t been washed enough, because they felt like sandpaper against my skin, abrasive as a scrubbing sponge. I lay awake listening to the irritating forced air hum of the central-heating system. It had become bitterly cold outside, a deep chill setting in, even invading my body in bed, insinuating itself under the covers the way Halley the Comet did when I was a kid. I usually slept perfectly, the sleep of the successful, deep and dreamless. I usually placed my head on my soft down pillow and one-thousand-thread-count sheets and miraculously discovered myself awake the next morning, the classical radio on, violins chattering, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, the shower filling the room with steam, my face full of recognition, razor in hand. That night, however, I was lying in bed staring at the tiled ceiling and I couldn’t let go. Whether it was because of the sheets or the forced air hum or the light I don’t know, but I was wondering, couldn’t stop wondering, where it could be, where the evidence was hidden, the fucking evidence—an old plastic Wonder-bread bag, a little girl’s red sneaker, a hunting knife, black handled—when I saw it. In a fraction of a second millions of neurons fired across my cerebellum, creating that single charge of realization, the burst of electricity that is a conscious thought, and I knew where it must be, had to be.

  I saw it.

  It was like something had come unlocked, a synapse had connected in just the right way, or disconnected, the right combination of serotonin and dopamine had been released. I could practically feel the pulsing of blood in my temples. I could almost hear the nerves crackling with electricity, the play of information along chemical routes through the ganglia of my nervous system. I found my feet on the hardwood floor. I found my hands reaching for the reading lamp. For some reason, I slipped into the clothes I had been planning to wear the next day—dress shoes, a gray suit, pinstriped, a pink shirt, monogrammed. But it didn’t matter. Tomorrow didn’t matter at all, I told myself. Tomorrow was canceled. I touched my face on the way out to the car and felt stubble, rough and sharp. I looked at my Philippe Patek in the yellow glow of the driveway light and saw that it was nearly three in the morning. I didn’t remember putting this watch on, a watch that suddenly seemed alien. As I got in the car I realized that I had forgotten my jacket and overcoat. But I didn’t care. I’d get this over with quickly. Now that I knew. Now that I knew where it was, exactly, precisely where it was.
>
  How did I know where it was? Because I saw—for a fraction of an instant, I saw—through my brother’s eyes.

  For a fraction of an instant, everything had become clear.

  Inside the Jag, it was like a freezer, and I held my hands to my mouth and blew, trying to warm the skin. I put my key in the ignition, turned the engine, and waited a moment while the car thawed in the below-freezing temperature. Automatically, a compact disc came on in the stereo, one of the Brandenburg concertos, sweet and measured. But this was a night that didn’t need a soundtrack. This was the part of my life story I didn’t need in the documentary. I turned it off. I had an image of Fiona in my head, the way she had looked the night of the party through the trees, the people that had been standing all around the pool, cocktails and cigarettes in their hands, the mustachioed, blond Bryce Telliman standing alone off to the side, shirt open to his chest, eyes unfocused but flickering everywhere. I could see her tiny little-girl body in her red bathing suit with the white flower sewn between her two nonexistent breasts. I remembered the sneakers on her feet, red high-tops, one of them tied, the other flopping around unlaced.

  I pulled out of the long driveway and, without thinking, found myself on Sky Highway, the familiar whir of the tar road beneath the wheels, the yellow lines blurring by like lasers in a science-fiction movie. I understood like no one in my family how the human eye apprehends the physical world. I knew more than anyone how an image distorts when it is converted from light and dark to discrete particles of information and then converted into a picture of something recognizable. I knew what could happen when this ordinary process breaks down. I knew the blurring that could occur, and the rest of it: the panic, the sensations of fear, the psychological vertigo. I had been seeing double all my life. Through my own eyes, and through my brother’s.

  I knew what our mother was experiencing.

  I passed only three cars during the entire drive to the Thomas Edison Junior High School parking lot. And once there, I saw the same old orange BMW 2002, the same burgundy-mist Buick Skylark, the same white early eighties Mustang, the same few poachers who parked back along the edge of these woods knowing that no one else used this part of the lot, so far from the school, way beyond the football field. Warmer now, even perspiring, I turned the engine off and cut the headlights. I knew that my brother would never find the evidence, that he had, in fact, never even remembered where he’d put it. Memory doesn’t work that way. Details become cloudy, they switch around, become confused with so many other details that it is impossible to sort them all out. His brain was a blur, I thought. It takes someone else to decipher the memories, to find the shoelace of truth inside the snake pit of recollection. I got out of my car into the fierce cold and closed the door without locking it. I stepped off the pavement and walked across the grass into the woods of my boyhood, where my life’s experiment had begun.

  When I was just a boy I found my father’s old animal traps in the attic. Originally, they had been used for catching mink and muskrat, from the days—when our father was a kid—ordinary people sold animal pelts to Sears and Roebuck. When I was around twelve or thirteen I took three of these traps into these woods, setting them with bits and pieces of meat, carrots, cheese. Mostly, I caught squirrels and rabbits. In the mornings, I’d find the animals, their legs twisted and mangled from trying to get away, insane from the rage and pain of the rusty metal teeth. Sometimes, however, I’d find them catatonic, their undersides exposed, eyes all filmy and open, their bodies slack, wanting to die, I guess, or, often enough, already dead. Sometimes another animal would have come along, probably our cat, Halley the Comet, and they’d be gutted, their insides torn out, entrails exposed. I took these animals into the garage, usually, and experimented. I used a set of my mother’s kitchen utensils to dissect their organs, categorizing each system with my old copy of Gray’s Anatomy, trying to compare the animal equivalents to the organs of the human body. I have to say I became surprisingly knowledgeable about the structure of small mammals. But if one of them was still alive, I’d tack its body down by the fur and limbs to my father’s workbench. Then I’d carefully remove the back of its skull with a serrated bread knife. If I was successful, the animal’s brain would be exposed, but its body still quivering, and I would touch different parts of its squirrel or rabbit or woodchuck nervous system just to see which parts of its body twitched. Bit by bit, I’d cut pieces away, seeing how long it took them to stop breathing.

  Right now I took a few quiet steps into the woods, looking for the path I had taken home every day from school for so many years. Once I found it, I walked along confidently, more certain of my direction with every step.

  The animals didn’t last long without their brains, of course. But every now and then I found a squirrel or a rabbit who surprised me, who could live for quite a while—minutes, it seemed—without a central nervous system.

  My father had given me the hunting knife when I was around ten, in secrecy. It was the knife I used to sever the legs off the little animals I had caught in his traps. It had a curved, steel blade, an ebony handle with a silver inlay of a rhinoceros. It came with a black leather sheath that attached to my belt and a small sharpening stone. Dad made me promise, when he gave it to me, never to tell my mother I had it, it was just between us guys. I carried this knife into the woods every day, checking the traps. And as the summers went by, I became more and more proficient at cutting the legs off the animals I caught, finding the right way to sever a clean line through the bone, slicing, and not tearing, through the surrounding flesh.

  No one cared about that fucking cat, anyway.

  I found him in the basement one day, sleeping on a pile of old blankets. I picked him up, petting his tangerine head and stroking the fur of his neck so he wouldn’t be afraid. Halley the Comet loved everyone insanely, a glutton for affection. I could feel the sinewy cat muscles beneath his soft orange-and-white-striped fur. His eyes were slits. He even seemed to smile at me, and I could feel the little enginelike rumble inside him, his soft purr. I carried Halley the Comet into the garage and placed him on the workbench. He wanted to get down, suddenly panicked. I had to fight him now, and Halley tore long, deep scratches into my arms. He even got my face, his rear foot claws digging into the skin of my cheek as he tried to push off. I touched my cheek and saw the blood on my hands, more brown than red. The next thing I had to do was to find a way to keep him down, and the only way was to hold him, pinning the cat’s body with one hand and my chest against the workbench and reaching to my belt for the knife with my other. This was easier than it sounds. He was just a cat, after all. I could hear a strangling, gurgling sound coming from Halley’s throat. It was like a baby screaming underwater. But when I did it, when I took the knife, which I had sharpened to a microscopic razor-thinness, and brought it down on his left rear leg, just below the joint, and cut, pushing down and through it like a carrot on the kitchen counter, Halley the Comet stopped making any noise at all. Like so many of the animals I had trapped, his body went catatonic, his muscles loosening beneath my grip. He even lost control of his bowels and bladder, shitting and pissing all over the workbench. There was also more blood than I thought there would be. It spurted onto my shirt and the floor. So I cauterized the wound with my father’s soldering iron. Then I carefully cleaned the area and wrapped it around and around with gauze and white tape. Halley was making a soft whining sound deep in his throat, not loud, so I stroked his neck again. He just started mewling then, one weak little cry after another, his eyes all filmy and despairing. I had been so absorbed in cutting off Halley’s leg I hadn’t been paying attention when the door to the kitchen opened. I looked up and saw my sister standing there, her jaw slack, her head shaking.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “Everything’s fine.”

  But she turned and ran back into the house, leaving the door to the kitchen ajar.

  In the woods, more than twenty years later, the ground was hard beneath my feet, the mud frozen,
and the air was dry and brittle. It felt like my lungs were filling with ice crystals. There was no wind, thankfully, and the sky was clear, with a bright half moon and pinpoint stars flickering like candlelight. It was a beautiful night, cold as it was. I could have walked through these woods with my eyes closed.

  So I closed my eyes for a moment and just stood there, breathing in.

  Everything had become so clear.

  Later, my mother came home and took me and Halley to see Dr. Herman, the veterinarian, a man with large, clean, hairless hands, doctor’s hands. I told him I had found the cat in the woods, caught in one of my animal traps, that the lower half of his leg was gone, I had dropped it in a panic. But I was congratulated. Dr. Herman said that if I hadn’t cut Halley’s leg so cleanly and cauterized the wound so expertly, Halley probably would have died of blood loss. He said I had a great future as a doctor. He also said he wasn’t sure how a cat could enjoy life without one of his rear legs. Dr. Herman looked at our mother. He recommended putting Halley to sleep.

  I remember that she sighed heavily.

  But that’s what this had all been about, I said, saving Halley, and I had an idea.

  I opened my eyes and walked straight to the clearing, to where the evidence was hidden.

  I had an idea.

  A little girl’s red sneaker, a hunting knife.

  It was there, just as I knew it had to be. In my very own hiding place. I remembered reaching into the old broken concrete pipe so many times when I was a teenager to find the grass or speed I kept stashed inside a container. There was just enough room in the small space for a piece of Tupperware, one I had taken from my mother’s kitchen. I used to come here every morning to pick up a couple of speed tablets, and then I’d return again in the afternoon, after football practice, to smoke a joint or two before going home so I’d have an appetite for dinner. Right now I felt around for the Wonderbread bag.

  There it was.

  Inside it, even in the darkness of these woods, I could see the red shoe. It was small—much, much smaller than I had remembered. No bigger than my palm. Also, still in its leather sheath, was the hunting knife my father had given me, the one I carried in these woods, looking for animals, for experiments, learning opportunities. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do with these things. They had worried me all my life, the only objects that had ever escaped me, and now they were in my possession. I stood in the clearing and removed the knife from the bag, holding its ebony handle. It felt smooth, fitting my grasp like a finely made surgical tool. I slipped it out of the sheath and ran my finger along the blade. There was no blood encrusted here, no dried matter, nothing to link anyone to anything. It was as clean as if it had been sterilized, the blade still sharp, the point unbroken. I may have even laughed to myself at this moment. I may even have been smiling when the flash of the camera went off and I heard my brother say, “I thought these things weren’t real, Eric. I thought you said there was no evidence.”