by Marc Laidlaw
“No,” Howard said. “He was dry last night. We haven’t had weed in a week. Uh . . . sorry, Hawk.”
“So maybe somebody had something he wanted,” Edgar said. “Like a lid.”
“Coulda been a girl,” someone else said. “I mean, Craig, he’d let a rattlesnake suck his dick.”
A loud thumping from down the hillside carried to them. A huge figure approached from the trailer, carrying a massive box. As Stoner walked into the circle of light, Hawk jumped up and gave a disgusted cry. The stupid oaf! His boys froze when they saw the word PENDLETON stenciled across the side of the crate.
Hawk would have struck him, but he was too afraid of upsetting Stoner. Instead, with all the diplomacy he could muster, he said very quietly, almost whispering, “What’s wrong with you, Stoner?”
“I was just gonna ask where you want me to put ’em, since you said we should hide any shit that could get us in trouble.” Hawk was expecting visits from the police. The matter of Stoner’s grenade stash had somehow slipped his mind until now. He had to wonder where the box had been hiding.
“Just—just set that thing down,” he said calmly, with a soft, patting gesture, to demonstrate how it should be done.
“Really,” said one of the boys. “Stoner, man, you are massively fucked!”
Stoner chuckled, stooped over, and set the box on the dirt, none too gently. Hawk relaxed slightly.
“I know a good place for that,” Edgar said.
Hawk gave him a nod. “Can we do it tonight? I don’t want this hanging around.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Hawk nodded to Stoner. “Put that thing in the jeep. Wrap it in foam or something first. Shit.”
Edgar started down the hill, and the others got up to follow him. Hawk stopped them with a word.
“I don’t want anybody in on this except Stoner and Edgar. The less of you know where this stuff is stashed, the safer we’ll all be. Not that I don’t trust you like my own little lambs.”
A few of them made bleating sounds.
Thirty minutes later—Hawk driving at unaccustomed speed, slowing to a crawl for every turn, braking whenever the headlights suggested a bump or crack in the street ahead—they drove past Edgar’s house to the end of Shoreview Road. He gave fervent thanks that he’d installed new shocks in the Jeep three months ago; even so, the ride had never seemed so jolting. They parked by a padlocked fence. Beyond was a private dirt road so deeply rutted that in places it looked like a stream bed. Even if he’d had a key to the gate, Hawk would not have driven a box of hand grenades over that road for any price.
He stood back while Stoner unloaded the crate, wrapped in a piece of foam mattress. He winced when Stoner tossed the box onto his shoulder and held it there one-handed.
“Would you mind keeping both hands on that?” he said. “Edgar, you lead the way. I want you to give Stoner plenty of light to see where he’s stepping. And Stoner, please, don’t trip.”
“Shit, Hawk, I’m light on my feet.”
“Uh-huh.”
For a while, the flashlight glittered on broken bottle-glass and corroded cans, burst tires, pulped and desiccated newspaper; the ruts in the road looked like canyons. Stoner avoided most of this without having to be warned. But then Edgar set off through weeds and brush. They passed a TV with its guts blown out, a bullet-riddled tin can stuck on a stick, spent cartridges. All Hawk could see was the moving spot of light leading them on; the rest of the world was a blank. They moved through a dense patch of thistles that had blanketed the ground with white down. Stoner cursed as the spines of the fierce bushy plants stabbed him. If there had ever been a trail here, it hadn’t been used in years.
“Couldn’t you find an easier way, Edgar?” Hawk said.
“Yeah, watch out here, it’s kind of slippery. There’s like a cliff.”
Stoner grunted and stepped onto bare dirt. Dust smoked from his heels. Hawk followed in dimmer light, and felt the ground crumble. His feet nearly went out from under him. He crouched down for balance, cursing, and heard Stoner laugh. “You okay back there, Hawk? Better give him more light, Edgar—whoa!”
“This is the worst part,” Edgar said.
At that moment, the flashlight went dead. “Shit!”
“Don’t move!” Hawk yelled.
“Jesus,” said Stoner, somewhere ahead of him, “I can’t see a thing.”
The light came on again, weaker but still alive. Edgar was shaking the flashlight, which made everything jump. He was below them, shining the light up at Stoner’s feet. “You make it down okay?”
“Coming,” Stoner grunted, and crouched to skid and slide down the steep hillside, without any hands for balance. Hawk swallowed the ball in his throat. At the bottom, next to Edgar, Stoner rose up chuckling. “Used to do that all the time when I was a kid.”
“You may not live to be an adult if you keep it up,” Hawk said. “Look out.” Then he slid, too, and joined them at the bottom, coughing at the dust he’d raised.
Edgar went on across flat, unmarked, weedy ground, shaking the flashlight repeatedly to keep it alive. Hawk saw a dark ridge above them, it could have been five feet away or five hundred.
“Around here somewhere,” Edgar said, and started scuffing at the dirt with a toe.
“Can I put this down?” Stoner asked.
“Gently.”
“Here it is,” Edgar said. He knelt near a juniper bush, one hand tugging at what looked like a bit of gnarled root. He pulled it and dirt sifted free of a big piece of board. He leaned the trapdoor against the bush and leaned over, looking down into the large square pit he’d uncovered.
“It goes in a few feet,” he said. “Leo and I dug it, you know, as a hideout. Took us a week.”
“I’ll get down there first,” Hawk said. “Then you hand it to me.
He edged past Edgar and lowered himself in. Touching bottom, he could just rest his elbows on the edge of the pit. Stoner appeared above him, already hefting the crate. Hawk tensed to receive it. The fucker was even heavier than he’d remembered. He crouched down awkwardly, cramped in the hole, straining to keep the box steady. When he had it down on the earth, he asked for the flashlight and aimed it deeper into the hole.
A tunnel went back about six feet, into a chamber with another sheet of plywood for a ceiling. Hawk pushed the crate into the far end of the burrow till it butted up against the earthen wall. He crouched there with it for a moment, smelling the close, confining dirt, studying the den’s features, imagining how a couple of boys might hide out here in a world of secrets, thinking of how little kids pulled blankets over chairs and tables to fabricate caves and tunnels, how darkness held such power over humankind because it had reigned over the imagination since the beginning oflife. Were children ever taught to fear the dark, or was such fear instinctive? Darkness, he thought, is so much a part of us that we never know where to begin doing battle with it . . . if indeed that’s the proper response.
Stuff for a sermon, here.
There were little shelves gouged into the walls, holding candle stubs, books of matches. A roll of magazines was stuffed in another niche. Hawk picked up one of them, expecting motorcycles or hot rods. He was disappointed to see the raunchiest sort of porn, Danish stuff, closeups of gaping cavities, lots of slime and wet pink mattress-meat. He supposed he should be grateful for an absence of donkey dicks and shit-eaters, but it was hard to keep his perspective in the clammy little burrow. The walls exuded a moldy stink he hadn’t noticed at first.
“What’s that?” Stoner said suddenly, startling him. He’d dropped down into the hole. Hawk shoved the magazine back onto the crude shelf and backed out, pushing Stoner ahead of him, glad for fresh air. “Nothing, go on, let’s cover this up.”
When they had camouflaged the trap again, and were hiking back uphill, Hawk said, “So Edgar, you come here often?”
“Naw,” Edgar said. “Not since Leo moved away. Used to play here a lot, but that was, you know . . . I sort
of grew out of it. It’s more of a little kid’s thing.”
Just then, the light went out completely. It had been dying for so long that it made little difference; their eyes were already used to the dark. They shuffled along through the dust, hardly speaking, until Stoner said, “Is it true what I heard about Craig, Hawk?”
Hawk tensed, knowing what he meant, but not wanting it to get around. He didn’t want Edgar to hear, for some reason; not that Edgar’s ears were tender. He had to admit that he couldn’t protect the boys from everything—or from anything, really.
“I don’t know,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just a rumor.”
“What is?” Edgar asked.
Hawk wasn’t about to say it himself, but he couldn’t stop Stoner from speaking.
“The killer cut his balls off,” Stoner said. “And took ’em along wherever he went.”
PART TWO: ESP
12
Midway through the summer, with no warning, Scott Gillette called Mike to announce that he was moving.
“It’s fuckin’ Walter,” Scott said. “Shit-eatin’ bastard psycho fuckhead. He’s known for weeks, but he kept it from us. Even from my goddamn mother.”
“Knew what? Where are you going?”
Scott groaned into the phone. “Can you come down here?”
“It’ll take awhile.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Not till I go to Texas.”
“Texas? Jeez! Okay, I’m coming.”
He dropped the phone and ran downstairs, through Ryan’s room, its white walls now covered with sports posters and pennants, the visible portions scuffed by sneakers and imprinted with the pentagonal patterns of a soccer ball Ryan kicked around when no adults were home. TV sounds blasted up the spiral steps. Mike yelled down the stairwell: “Ryan! I’m going to Scott’s! Tell Mom!”
A muted yell answered him. He hurried back upstairs, ducking into his room for his skateboard, his backpack and a windbreaker. Outside, he climbed steep streets toward the highest ridge in Shangri-La, passing the vacant lot where he’d hid in the grass his first night up here, then a huge round water storage tank he hadn’t noticed in the dark that night, and which he hardly noticed now. He was already accustomed to the neighborhood. How had that happened? The long, quiet streets were home now—as familiar as the beaches. When he wasn’t with Scott or Edgar, he sat in his room under the painted moon and drew. He had plenty of time for it. The Glantz sisters had found his clipboard in the storeroom, legions of gory monsters and naked barbarian women parading around under the light-bulb inventory lists. On Tuesday following the move, Mr. Glantz had greeted him with the clipboard and a handful of torn-up illustrations. “Now I see what you are, boy.”
Even though his days were free again, Mike stayed up in Shangri-La unless he had reason to leave it. He liked the isolation, the silent streets, the absence of crowds. The only thing he didn’t like was the utter lack of girls. There were none up here as far as he could tell—hardly any families at all. Two men shared the house next door to them, a homosexual couple—“gays,” his mother called them. Sal was apparently one of a community up here. Not that Mike saw much of his neighbors. Jack had built him a desk inside the walk-in closet, and sometimes he sat there six hours at a stretch with his pens and pencils and oil pastels, drawing dragons and armored gunmen, barbarian warriors with blood-drenched broadswords, skeleton things, spaceships and sleek cars, lithe half-naked women clinging to the legs of brawny soldiers. Creatures from his imagination were all that interested him. The rest of the world was so quiet and boring in its day-to-day sameness. Even this neighborhood had divulged but one night of excitement; then, as if spent, all its mysteries exhausted, it had shut up so tight that it seemed a different neighborhood entirely. It was hard to believe he had ever been afraid here—that the house where he lived, packed full of furniture and his mother’s flowers, was the same empty shell in which he had sought shelter from Sal’s gang.
Right now the nearness of Sal’s house made him recall the events of that night, but as he stepped on the board and kicked away from the curb, thoughts of the key vanished again for a while.
He had new troubles staring him in the face. Scott was moving to Texas?
It seemed impossible, not yet a real threat. He and Scott would undoubtedly come up with a scheme to upset the whole plan and keep the move from happening. There was plenty of time to outwit Walter.
From the south end of Shangri-La, a long twisting street went down through the hills, past cliff-perched houses that seemed to be made mostly out of glass.
Mike hesitated at the top of the descent, looking down at the ocean hundreds of feet below, wishing he had the guts and the balance to step on the board and gather all the speed he could, cutting those dangerous curves with skill and precision.
Edgar had given him the skateboard and a few riding lessons, but Mike had finally begun to admit he didn’t have the necessary reckless confidence for the sport—not to mention the balance. He hated lugging the board around and could never stay on for long. He was wary of tumbling and scraping up his hands and knees, banging on the hard cement.
Still, it was faster than walking down the long hills. So few people lived this high up that hitchhiking was unreliable.
Compromising, he sat down on the board, grabbed the sides, and raised his feet.
It was speedy transportation, even sitting. Several times cars came down behind him and honked. He banked way over to the side of the road—there were no sidewalks or shoulders here—and let them pass. He wobbled and fell frequently; but braking with his feet, he kept his speed well under control, and none of his spills were painful. When he ran out of hill, he tucked the board under his arm, walked to the Coast Highway, and stuck out his thumb. It took only two minutes to get a ride, there were so many cars.
Scott lived in South Bohemia, up a shady hill street. There were no crowds south of town, since the beaches were private and restricted to residents—some of them nudists. The warm hush suited the depression Mike felt stealing over him. Gloom gave way to shock when he saw Scott’s house. The front deck was heaped with cardboard boxes.
Scott’s stepfather appeared at the picture window, making Mike flinch into the shadow of a hedge. Walter unnerved him. This latest action—abrupt and unexpected coming from anyone else—was completely in character. When Walter turned away from the window, Mike hurried down the driveway. He could hear voices yelling inside the house, as something heavy slammed down, or shut, or into something else.
Scott lived in a room Walter had built for him by running a partition down the center of the garage and dropping in a ceiling. When Mike knocked, Scott pulled the warped door open, scraping it over the cement floor of his room, which was littered with moldy, mismatched shag-carpet remnants. Scott blinked out at the day, his eyes looking small, red and puffy. It was dark in the long, narrow room where one little desk lamp burned. It smelled of the oily engine parts stored in the other half of the garage. Scott hauled the door shut behind Mike and threw a heavy crossbar latch across it.
Mike was at least half a foot shorter than Scott, but the ceiling was so low it brushed his hair when he walked. Scott was forced to stoop continuously. He went to the bed at the far end of the room and sat down heavily. The place was a worse mess than ever. Usually Scott’s books, if nothing else, were neatly organized, running along the walls in alphabetical order. Today they lay in collapsing heaps, sliding over the bare floor, some thrown haphazardly into boxes.
On the bed beside Scott were various weapons, including saber, foil and epee. It was the fully loaded—and cocked—speargun that caught Mike’s eye. He stepped aside when he saw the barbed tip aimed right at his crotch.
Scott noticed, and picked up the gun. “If Walter comes in, I’m shooting him. You can be my witness.”
“Watch out with that,” Mike said.
Scott grinned and pulled the trigger. The bolt flew past Mike and buried itself with a splintering thunk in the door.
&nb
sp; “Jesus!”
Scott got up, hunched over as always, and stomped across the room. He worked the spear out of the door as violently as possible, ripping it free along with several jagged shards of wood. When he was finished, a second small source of light pierced the gloom.
Mike glanced over at Scott’s desk, where piles of typing paper were stacked. Scott was writing a book about “Rupert Giles,” a boy genius who continually devised ways of slowly killing his evil stepfather, “Wally”: domestic warfare not so loosely based on Scott’s own life. In the latest installments, Rupert had hired a Mafia hit man to castrate “Wally” with a steam iron. The book was called Seascape, With Dead Stepfather.
“So . . .” Mike said. “How’s the book?”
“It’s finished. I mean, we’re moving to Texas. There’s no seascape where we’re going.”
“You could put that in. It would be sort of funny.”
“What, Panhandle, With Dead Stepfather?”
“It couldn’t be any weirder than the rest of it.” He was trying desperately to find some bright spot in all this.
Scott reloaded the speargun. “I may never write again. Fucking Texas, day after tomorrow. It’s all worked out, Mike. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But—but, why?”
“Walter got a job. My mom’s been after him for fucking years to get a job, and when he finally does, it’s in Texas! The shitty thing is, he probably won’t keep it more than a week. We’ll get out there and something will happen, he’ll flip out again with one of his Vietnam flashbacks, attack a state trooper instead of a beach parking-lot attendant, and that’ll be it. Since my mom doesn’t have a job there, and they probably don’t need more teachers, we’ll be stranded forever. In Texas! I can’t believe it!”
Mike dropped into the desk chair.
A fit of screaming broke the prolonged silence. Voices came from the house. Then they heard the crashing of glass.
“One less lamp to pack,” Scott said.
Ms. Gillette’s voice rose high and shrill, the words unintelligible. Walter’s response was pitched ominously low.
